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

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

#161

Post by bitdivision »

avgcorrection wrote: post #145
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.

Yes, I agree, Spanish is generally more verbose.

The weird one is that Latin American Spanish is spoken much slower, but with the same information per syllable (presumably). I always wondered if the information rate would actually be the same for Spanish (LATAM) and Spanish (Spain) - my suspicion is that it's lower in LATAM. Perhaps pauses and connective words could account for the difference though?

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

#162

Post by pwillia7 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #115
irrational wrote: post #67

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…

She said goodbye too many times before doesn't seem confusing to me.

He's lamenting a romance that's been difficult for him. Before now, during the difficult relationship, she said goodbye or left him too many times, causing the difficulty and toll it has taken on him.

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

#163

Post by nicolaslegland »

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…

In the version from Google Translate, "trop souvent" adds a notion of frequency like "too often" would, "avant" is shoehorned as a misplaced compulsory match for "before" when "too many times before" already felt like a ready-made phrase at this point.

In yours, "salua" would likely pass as a greeting, while "excessivement" would rather refer to the silly moves she made. Definitely harder to read for me.

I agree the "before" is the hard part to get right, I process "too many times before" as "too many times already", emphasis on reaching that number of times, given the song's context. Maybe we should treat "said […] before" as a smoothest form of "had said […]" to sing.

I'd go for "Elle a tant de fois dit au revoir" (9 syllabes).

Change my French mind.

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

#164

Post by dlainhart »

mbg721 wrote: post #122
enkid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The cat" has different information in it than "kot." That same sentence also translates to "A cat is on the table," but no English speaker would say "the cat" and "a cat" have the same meaning. In fact, I can't think of a context where both sentences would be interchangeable. The listener either already knows which cat is "the cat" or would be confused. "A cat" implies an unknown cat. If you walk into your house and…

"The cat" is folksy/chummy in a similar way to "the wife".

From a data compression/language efficiency standpoint, both sentences in both languages actually rely on a (potentially large) amount of unstated context to sort out these ambiguities. In some languages, this context can be totally unspoken and merely known to both the speaker and the listener. This absolutely MUST be accounted for if a truly correct translation is to be made.

For instance, your assumption that the definite "the cat" is being used idiomatically like so: this sentence, used in the manner you offer, might be used in conversation might occur in a farmhouse somewhere between an old man and woman who have lived together in this house for a long time, i.e. American Gothic. There's a vast amount of shared information and a perception of very little ambiguity held by both the speaker and the listener (whether correct or mistaken!). Any of those might fail. Furthermore, to use this sentence in English unadorned by context requires that both the speaker and listener have a shared reference to _what_ cat is being referred to by the definite article, "the". This very well might come with an unambiguous default in other languages!

Translation only gets more complicated from this.

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

#165

Post by wink »

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.

Only with context! As is seen in one comment, the pronoun is left out and just the 2 words would only say "[third person] did something". My Latin lessons were very long ago, but yeah. You'd probably declare it once per paragraph, then shorten. But in isolation this information is lost.

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

#167

Post by bentcorner »

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…

> "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is a VERY efficient compression for what is presumably a very long story about two hunters who met at an island and fought a beast together, but it is only efficient to the people who speak that language. The "local" efficiency (to the population who speak the language) is very high, but the "global" efficiency isn't.

I suppose image macros/memes are the modern equivalent. Social context enables readers to "decompress" the meme.

[Drake top]: "Two hunters who met at an island and fought a beast together"

[Drake bottom]: "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"

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

#168

Post by thaumasiotes »

dghf wrote: post #140
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…

> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence 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 pr…

It is indeed quite common for poetry to violate the normal rules of the language. But that takes one of two forms: archaism, or a flaw in the poetry. (It's also common for poetry to violate the rules that govern the poetry itself. Composing poetry is very difficult!) Compare the opening of Mark Chesnutt's She Was:

She started her new life

Ten dollars in debt

That's all it took to get started back then

A trip to the courthouse across the state line

No one could stop her

She'd made up her mind

He was eighteen

And she wasn't

But she said she was / and never thought twice

And came back home as my daddy's wife

She just shook her head

When her mama said "Are you sure he's the one?"

But she was

Here we see some fairly complex temporal structure handled fluently, with no problems of any kind. The writing is better.

>> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence

> Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?

The use of the simple past tense is not compatible with the sense of before that everyone here is trying to assign.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] »

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).

[deleted]
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