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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?

#191

Post by xdennis »

screamingninja wrote: post #146
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.

That's nothing, in Nuxalk, clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' means "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant".

It's a single word sentence with no vowels, pronounced as [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ] (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C... ).

It's formed from: xł- (“have”) + p̓x̣ʷłt (“bunchberry”) + -łp (“plant”) + -łł (pluperfect marker) + -s (possessive marker) + kʷc̓ (of uncertain function)

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

#192

Post by hnbad »

r0b1n wrote: post #104
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…

If you cheat a little, you can get to similarly low numbers in German: "Zuviele Abschiede von ihr" - 8 "Ihre zuvielen Abschiede" - 8 "[Sie] verabschiedete sich zu oft" - 8-9 If you accept "trennen" ("separate") for "saying goodbye", you can do "[Sie] trennte sich zu oft" - 5-6 If you accept "[weg]gehen" (go [away]) for "saying goodbye", you can also do "[Sie] ging zu oft [weg]" - 3-5 The "Sie" (she) is optional, but…

More like "Sie verabschiedete sich zu viele Male zuvor" (literally, "she farewelled too many times before", but acceptable to a native speaker).

And no, you can't omit "sie", German is not a Romantic language and the pronoun is required even if the verb has to match it by case anyway.

I'd say your examples are more than "a little" cheating. Most of these are incomprehensible or completely fail to deliver the same idea as the original. You can truncate sentences in poetry but at some point you just end up with disjointed fragments.

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

#194

Post by hgsgm »

Majromax wrote: post #108
benrutter wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in the grammar, I think the distinction you're getting at is pluperfect (plan action that was completed-in-the-past-in-the-past) and perfect (an action that was completed-in-the-past). "She had said goodbye too many times before" means, at some point in the past, it was the case that she had previously said goodbye too many times. I think this is the intended meaning. "She said goodbye too many t…

> "She said goodbye too many times before" I don't think makes sense if you're extremely literal about it, since I can't see what "before" would track to without the embedded past. It would grammatically work if you interpreted 'said' as a habitual action. "Before [the etiquette training], she said 'goodbye' too many times. [Now, she says it just once.]" In the context of the song, I think the habitual interpretation…

I don't think that matches. In your version, "before" implies that something happened that affected the goodbye-saying.

In the song, "before" is an adverb referring to the current time in the story, which does not impact the goodbye-saying.

I can only make yours scan if I interpret it as "She said goodbye too many times before... I stopped taking her back.

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

#195

Post by self_awareness »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #120
self_awareness wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like "she'd been saying goodbye too often" is "zbyt często żegnała", but adding "zbyt często już żegnała" is like "she'd been saying goodbye too often, but now she's fed up with saying goodbyes, and doesn't do that anymore". Of course "Kiedyś żegnała się zbyt często" is more explicit and understandable, but not as efficient for this competition :)

It doesn't really capture the intent of the original sentence either. To convey the same idea you'd have to say something like "Za wiele razy mówiła żegnam"

"Say goodbye" doesn't necessarily mean "to speak the words 'goodbye'". I'm not an English expert, but I think that waving with your hand is also "saying goodbye". And if that's true, then "żegnać" is the same as "saying goodbye".

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

#197

Post by jgwil2 »

da39a3ee wrote: post #136
bloak wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yep, for example, it's standard for US speakers to say "I wish you would have done X instead" whereas Brits would say that should be "I wish you had done X instead". I believe that that construction is a past subjunctive (since it's counterfactual) and therefore that the Brits are essentially right here ("had" is a past subjunctive form but "would have" is not; it's a conditional).

This is not standard or correct in American English either, though interestingly, German uses the same form for both situations ("ich wünsche, du hättest es getan" vs "du hättest es getan, wenn..."), so if that construction is more common in American English it's possible that it's due in part to the influence of German speakers.

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

#198

Post by Vox_Leone »

tail_exchange wrote: post #21

I think you can achieve the same "compression" in other latin languages. In portuguese, you may be able to translate this as "despedira-se demais" or "despediu-se demais" (despediu-se = she said goodbye, despedira-se = pluperfect form of she said goodbye, demais = too many times).

My shot >> Illa dixit vale multis temporibus

(*) if you drop the pronoun you can even sing the Latin lyrics on the same division. :)

In colloquial pt_BR that would be 'Ela disse adeus muitas vezes [antes]'

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

#199

Post by marcodiego »

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…

The most natural translation in modern Portuguese is "Ela disse adeus vezes demais antes."

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

#200

Post by ajuc »

tail_exchange wrote: post #21

I think you can achieve the same "compression" in other latin languages. In portuguese, you may be able to translate this as "despedira-se demais" or "despediu-se demais" (despediu-se = she said goodbye, despedira-se = pluperfect form of she said goodbye, demais = too many times).

Slavic too. In Polish: żegnała (she said goodbye) za często (literally too often, but used here it would convey the meaning and sound more natural than literal za wiele razy).

BTW żegnała encodes the gender. If it was he it would be żegnał. So arguably it's more compressed than latin.

BTW2 the real compression happens in conditionals żegnałaby = she would have said goodbye

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