131–140 of 328 posts
syllable count english 10 - She said goodbye too many times before latin 6 - nimium valedīxit polish 7 - Zbyt często się żegnała german 10 - Sie hat sich schon zu oft verabschiedet french 11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant italian 12 - Ha detto addio troppe volte prima portuguese 11 - despedira-se demasiadamente (user tail_exchange) 14 - Ela despediu-se demasiadas vezes antes (deepl) nb: the target sentence…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a word used frequently in the Hebrew Bible that is four letters long ויהי that is typically translated into English using 5 words or 19 letters “and it came to pass”. See, for example, the beginning of Genesis 4:3. This makes me wonder, what is the largest difference between letter count in two different languages? This example has a 4:19 ratio. Depending on what translation you go with (I think the consensu…
Letter count is meaningless. You can change it by just changing the way you spell things, which was already arbitrary. (For example, there is a very real question of whether that final m in nimium is pronounced at all.) Nimium saepe valedixit is 9 syllables and, as frequently noted on the page, does not attempt to translate the entire English source text, which is 10 syllables. It was kind of surreal reading the answ…
And the first line is past tense, just like the second.
Edit: Reading all of the lyrics they were sleeping together, she fell in love with him so he broke it off
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Letter count is meaningless. You can change it by just changing the way you spell things, which was already arbitrary. (For example, there is a very real question of whether that final m in nimium is pronounced at all.) Nimium saepe valedixit is 9 syllables and, as frequently noted on the page, does not attempt to translate the entire English source text, which is 10 syllables. It was kind of surreal reading the answ…
I am not a native speaker, but doesn't "before" just mean "in the past" here? It sounds clear to me: the girl has previously tried to break up many times, so now he is breaking up with her.
That is a strong possibility. It doesn't solve the problem with the line; to make sense, it should say she's said goodbye too many times before.
> It sounds clear to me: the girl has previously tried to break up many times, so now he is breaking up with her.
That is not so strong; the first verse is phrased in a way that suggests she is leaving him, not the other way around:
I was so high, I did not recognize
The fire burning in her eyes
The chaos that controlled my mind
Whispered goodbye as she got on a plane
Never to return again but always in my heart, oh
(On first impression, I assumed this verse meant that the girl was dead, but she could just be leaving.)
syllable count english 10 - She said goodbye too many times before latin 6 - nimium valedīxit polish 7 - Zbyt często się żegnała german 10 - Sie hat sich schon zu oft verabschiedet french 11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant italian 12 - Ha detto addio troppe volte prima portuguese 11 - despedira-se demasiadamente (user tail_exchange) 14 - Ela despediu-se demasiadas vezes antes (deepl) nb: the target sentence…
There is surely multiple alternatives for any given language, similar to Draconis compressing the latin form, in french instead of the literal: 11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant You could replace: * "dire au revoir" by "saluer" (which used both for greeting and farewell so you get a bit of data information lost) * "trop souvent" which uses the "trop" adverbe when there is a word for it: "excessivement" Whi…
That would not mean anything to a French speaker I'm afraid. "Saluer" is seldom used. It tends to mean "saying hello" or saluting someone in passing, more than "saying goodbye".
Elle a dit au revoir tellement souvent would work.
Better: Elle a dit adieu tellement souvent. Not the exact same meaning, but confers an undertone of dishonesty, as "adieu" should typically be said only once (it means you don't expect to see the other person ever again, except maybe in some afterlife).
Even better IMHO: Elle dit adieu si souvent. Present instead of past. A little farther from the original, but shorter and with a little more punch. It now implies it's something she does all the time.
I realise it's from song lyrics so doesn't have to make sense but this instinctively scans as poor grammar to me. Shouldn't it be "she'd" past tense? Otherwise it's just someone saying "goodbye too many times before" and someone who'd previously said "goodbye" more than is acceptable. ...I'm almost certainly overthinking this but I'd wager that tense error is important when translating to Latin. It's like reading XML…
> Shouldn't it be "she'd" past tense? Yes, probably (I don't know the context), but it seems to me that in colloquial US English the traditional complex tense system has been somewhat simplified: perhaps another example of the historical influence of Germans and other non-native speakers in the US. I'm British, of course, so I don't really know what I'm talking about here but I think I've heard native speakers of US…
I'm really sad at how much Latin I've managed to lose since my school days. It's really an incredible language and this stack exchange post shows some of that versatility. Because the words in Latin contain dense grammatical information in their spelling, you can be much more flexible with word order. This gives classical poets the ability to do crazy things with word ordering to create "word pictures" where the stru…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
German has many of those moments. It's a brilliant language for very specific uses, like user manuals.
to dare → herausfordern Eng: "I dare you to drink that" Deu: "Ich fordere dich heraus, das zu trinken." Almost double
Would Latin GPT come up with that 2 word phrase?
You can translate the phrase "She said goodbye too many times before" into Latin as "Dixit vale saepe nimis antea".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a word used frequently in the Hebrew Bible that is four letters long ויהי that is typically translated into English using 5 words or 19 letters “and it came to pass”. See, for example, the beginning of Genesis 4:3. This makes me wonder, what is the largest difference between letter count in two different languages? This example has a 4:19 ratio. Depending on what translation you go with (I think the consensu…
Letter count is meaningless. You can change it by just changing the way you spell things, which was already arbitrary. (For example, there is a very real question of whether that final m in nimium is pronounced at all.) Nimium saepe valedixit is 9 syllables and, as frequently noted on the page, does not attempt to translate the entire English source text, which is 10 syllables. It was kind of surreal reading the answ…
Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
> The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense.
But it's a song. Prosody can't be held to the same strict rules of tense consistency (or other grammatical rules) as prose. And flipping tenses between lines is hardly an uncommon feature of songwriting. Take, for example, Leonard Cohen's "Boogie Street":
A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it's time to go,
I tidied up the kitchenette,
I tuned the old Banjo.
I'm wanted at the traffic jam
and so on.