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How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

latin.stackexchange.com

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Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#141

Post by tragomaskhalos »

raverbashing wrote: post #102
dTal wrote: post #7

People wondering why this is on Hacker News - probably the fascinating part is how a relatively complex 7 word phrase in English translates idiomatically into a 2 word phrase in Latin.

So it seems this is why "classical Latin" died out and "vulgar Latin" became the romance languages of today Because while "classical Latin" was capable of doing those antics, it was limited for day to day use. Phrasal and noun endings were complicated and wouldn't play well with day to day usage

Yes it seems certain that classical Latin - and Greek - have come down to us in a written form that was fairly artificial; in Bodmer's wonderful phrasing, we can assume that "the crossword puzzles of Cicero" (ie the complex juggling about of words by relying on inflections) were eschewed in favour of a fixed word order when he was bawling out one of his slaves.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#142

Post by pavlov »

dTal wrote: post #7

People wondering why this is on Hacker News - probably the fascinating part is how a relatively complex 7 word phrase in English translates idiomatically into a 2 word phrase in Latin.

The same translation logic works in Finnish: “liikaa hyvästeli” is the equivalent of the Latin “nimium valedixit”.

Finnish doesn’t have gender pronouns so you can’t distinguish between he and she in most contexts. Adding that distinction in an idiomatic way would make the translation quite a bit longer.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#144

Post by trgn »

tail_exchange wrote: post #78
lopis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lost the gender of the person though, which from my understanding is preserved in Latin with a verb suffix.

That is true. It could also be used by a "he", so there is a bit of ambiguity.

I'm really curious, where is the gendered information in "valedixit"? I feel like the proposed translation misses that romantic weight by keeping the gender ambiguous. What am I missing?

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#145

Post by avgcorrection »

bitdivision wrote: post #82

Mostly unrelated, but there was a study [0] some time ago which said that the information rate of all languages was roughly the same. So if a language had more data conveyed per syllable, then it might be spoken slower for instance. 0: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

Spanish (Spain) is often spoken faster than English. And in my experience if you translate something from English to Spanish the text becomes 20%–30% longer.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#146

Post by screamingninja »

monster_group wrote: post #49

While I don't know Latin, I do know Sanskrit. In Sanskrit you can say entire sentences with one word. For example "जिगमिषामि।" is a full sentence and it means "I want to go." This is possible because Sanskrit (and Latin) are highly inflected languages. The price for brevity is that now you have to remember many more forms of verbs and nouns. So nothing impressive (at least to me).

I find it highly impressive, but that's just me.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#149

Post by smaddox »

dTal wrote: post #7

People wondering why this is on Hacker News - probably the fascinating part is how a relatively complex 7 word phrase in English translates idiomatically into a 2 word phrase in Latin.

Roughly the same number of syllables, though.

Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?

#150

Post by jackcosgrove »

I wonder if the original question -asking if a popular song lyric could be translated into Latin - was asked because someone wants a tattoo of it.

I know a Latin teacher and she gets several emails a year from strangers asking her to translate phrases into Latin because they want them in a tattoo.

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