Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

latin.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 328 posts

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

#151

Post by tragomaskhalos »

alcover wrote: post #46

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…

However, English will usually come out at or near the top in terms of "syllable efficiency" due to its high incidence of common monosyllabic words, and the feature that inflectional suffixes will often not add a syllable (e.g. dog-s, love-d).

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

#152

Post by mannykannot »

neilkakkar wrote: post #2

I'm very confused, why is this so upvoted, someone mind explaining?

Aside from anything else, human language and its comprehension is an important aspect of AI, and the sheer variety among grammars is a salient feature that cannot be ignored.

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

#153

Post by thaumasiotes »

ChrisRR wrote: post #132
thaumasiotes wrote: post #115

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 don't think it's that complex. The implication seems to be that they have broken up/argued so many times before, and this time they're breaking up for good 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

> And the first line is past tense, just like the second.

This is a somewhat complex issue, so please bear with me.

First, we can dispense with the idea that the tense of the first line is "just like the second". They are different and the difference is quite significant.

Whether the first line should be called "past tense" or "present tense" is more of a fussy terminological issue. There are two concepts in linguistics which have to do with how the verb relates to a timeline:

- "Tense" has to do with whether the action takes place before, during, or after whatever time would be referred to by the word "now".

- "Aspect" has to do with the temporal structure of the action itself, rather than its position relative to a "camera" placed at "now": maybe the action occurs at an indivisible point in time ("That's when I noticed the rabbit"); maybe it takes place continuously over an extended duration ("I've been reading for thirty minutes"); maybe it occurs at a large number of separate points within a continuous window ("I used to visit the donut shop every day after school")

Except I used the wrong words just now. "Tense" and "aspect" are terms from syntax, and you can determine them purely by looking at the form of the verb. The definitions I gave belong to semantics: when I said "tense", I should have said "time", and I'm not sure what the semantics-specific term for the quality related to aspect is. Anyway, we name the verb forms, "tense" and "aspect", according to whether they primarily correspond with those semantic definitions.

Except, again, there's a little more to it. We'd like to name the verb forms according to this distinction, but there is a long tradition in Latin scholarship of referring to both of those distinctions by the same name, "tense", and this bled over into English.

So we can say the following about line 1 and line 2:

- Line 1 is, semantically, focused on the present. It is making a claim about "now".

- The verb is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "perfect tense"; according to the tense/aspect distinction described above, it is present tense (reflected in the form of have), indicating that we are talking about "now", and perfect aspect (reflected in the fact that have is used at all), indicating that the action described ("taking a toll") is already finished.

- Line 2 is semantically focused on the past. It is making a claim about some time before "now".

- The verb in line 2 is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "simple past" or "preterite" tense. The aspect is not clear, because the English preterite tense is used for multiple different verbal semantic aspects.

The fact that line 2 is talking about the past when the rest of the chorus is talking about the present is very strange.

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

#154

Post by seszett »

hashar wrote: post #109
alcover wrote: post #46

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 doesn't really have the same meaning, and sounds very awkward though, especially because "saluer" needs an object.

I'd say (considering the context, the meaning is that she "told me goodbye" too many times before): Elle m'a trop dit au revoir.

That's 6 syllables (7 if you pronounce the schwa) and I think that's close enough to what Maroon 5 mean in their song.

Elle m'a trop quitté could work as well, with 5 syllables. I don't think you can get shorter than that, each word here seems necessary and as small as can be, to me.

If you can spare a few syllables, "déjà trop" or "trop souvent" would make these sentences much more natural.

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

#155

Post by shanusmagnus »

chewxy wrote: post #76
alcover wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes! It touches language and compression, both dear subjects to programmers. If the accepted answer stands, that's remarkable. I wonder how one could measure a language efficiency. Maybe syllable count ? But one would need a sort of assembly to translate to and verify that a sentence computes the intended information.

You could measure the efficiency of a language by computing how many bits are required to store the semantics of a word/phrase/sentence losslessly. Assuming ideal encoding to bits of course. Think of things like perplexity and the like. However, traditional way of computing efficiency of compression would not be useful for a meaningful analysis of the efficiency of a language. Barring issues like having an ideal enco…

You can't store "the semantics" losslessly because you can't definitively say what the semantics of an utterance even are, unless you're using some reduced definition of the term, or a pre-selected frame, or a computer language.

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

#156

Post by bombcar »

klodolph wrote: post #124
alcover wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes! It touches language and compression, both dear subjects to programmers. If the accepted answer stands, that's remarkable. I wonder how one could measure a language efficiency. Maybe syllable count ? But one would need a sort of assembly to translate to and verify that a sentence computes the intended information.

If you translate it back into English, “she had said goodbye too much”, it’s clear that the real question is, “did the author mean something by those choices which the translation obliterated?” Translation is a process which both erases information and introduces new information. Any comparison of languages which tries to evaluate which languages are more compact has to work with some assumptions about what informati…

It’s hard enough to translate when there’s one meaning - but good writers often use multiple meaning of the same words - either for deeper meaning or for humor or other layered meanings.

That’s why the translations of Asterix are so impressive.

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

#158

Post by jeroenhd »

sandworm101 wrote: post #15

Yes, latin crams more meaning into each word (gender, tense ect) but that doesnt make it superior, rather different. English is generally short than french, but french remains the more exacting and clear language for communicating specific ideas.

Reducing word count is rather useless if you end up with words that are much longer.

The distinction of what a word is, is also pretty interesting to think about. When I read some old Dutch stories back in high school, I noticed the writers would glue together words that I would consider to be completely separate. The Latin word "quodsi" from the second answer is obviously a combination of "quod" and "si", two separate words, but "nimium saepe" isn't combined into "nimiumsaepe" despite Cicero often using those words together. "valedīxit" is just "vale" and "dīxit" smashed together into a single verb.

The proposed "illa nimium valedīxit" (from combining both answers, to include the stressed gender of the person in question) can be interpreted literally as "she overly goodbyesaid". You can derive the same meaning from reordering the words, but it won't sound as poetic.

I don't think English or French are more exacting and clear per se, I think that's more of a cultural thing for native speakers. Compare posh British English speakers to American English speakers; the exact same words can be used to either say something directly ("very interesting") or to hide complete disagreement behind a nice expression ("very interesting").

I wouldn't consider French to be any better or worse than English. It's just another language. Though, with the exception of the useless ^ here and there to indicate a missing s, French spelling matches pronunciation a lot better at least.

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

#159

Post by scarmig »

klodolph wrote: post #124
alcover wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes! It touches language and compression, both dear subjects to programmers. If the accepted answer stands, that's remarkable. I wonder how one could measure a language efficiency. Maybe syllable count ? But one would need a sort of assembly to translate to and verify that a sentence computes the intended information.

If you translate it back into English, “she had said goodbye too much”, it’s clear that the real question is, “did the author mean something by those choices which the translation obliterated?” Translation is a process which both erases information and introduces new information. Any comparison of languages which tries to evaluate which languages are more compact has to work with some assumptions about what informati…

> Translation is a process which both erases information and introduces new information.

There's an essay I enjoyed by Douglas Hofstadter which is all about this, though from an artistic POV without much (any?) information science. Translator, Trader. The title itself is a fun bit of translational wordplay on "traduttore, traditore."

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

#160

Post by wunderland »

denton-scratch wrote: post #148

The original English is ungrammatical, or at least incomplete; it helps a bit if you start from grammatical English. So first alter it to "She HAD said goodbye too many times before". Then it's essier to translate correctly.

Both “she said goodbye too many times before” and “she had said goodbye too many times before” are grammatically correct English. They have slightly different meanings.
Post reply on HN