201–210 of 328 posts
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…
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…
Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).
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…
Can you clarify what a "mate" is? What determines a word's "mate"? The position on the line? Their meaning?
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…
Perfect tense is common. Future is occasionally avoided like above. Pluperfect and future perfect are almost never used, and most speakers would convey that meaning a different way. E.g. "I'll visit the store before then" rather than "I'll have visited the store". There is also some pseudo future tenses related to "going/gonna" (e.g. "I'm going to do that").
I think tenses are probably taught in some schools, but I didn't learn any of this until I took other languages. The average US English speaker probably doesn't know the names of all the tenses and doesn't even know what subjunctive, indicative, etc. mean.
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]'
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…
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no indication anywhere in the song, as far as I can see, of what "before" refers to. Is English your native language? I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me. “Before” is a temporal indicator. You could replace it with another temporal indicator and the phrase would still make sense, For example, “She said goodbye too many times today”. You woul…
Yes, English is my native language. USA, California and New Mexico. For what it's worth, I qualified for SET by scoring 710 on the SAT verbal section at age 12. > I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me. It is a common phenomenon for people to claim that sentences are perfectly clear to them when, objectively, those sentences do not have a meaning at all.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]'
Can't really speak for colloquial pt_BR, but wouldn't that be "demasiadas" instead of "muitas"?
I could be, but it wouldn't sound natural in pt_BR colloquial mode.