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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?

#211

Post by irrational »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #129
irrational wrote: post #125

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.…

You are reading way too much into this. It’s just a pop song. This isn’t high literature. “Before now” makes the most sense to me, but, like poetry, you interpret it however you want. There is no right answer.

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

#212

Post by [deleted] »

Lio wrote: post #23

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…

[deleted]

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

#213

Post by mbg721 »

dlainhart wrote: post #164
mbg721 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

While that's true, anyone with a cat can tell you that their house instantly becomes a farmhouse, and they age years at a time on the spot as a result of said feline. The context is kind of a given.

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

#214

Post by Vox_Leone »

Vox_Leone wrote: post #210
Zecc wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't really speak for colloquial pt_BR, but wouldn't that be "demasiadas" instead of "muitas"?

>but wouldn't that be "demasiadas" instead of "muitas"? I could be, but it wouldn't sound natural in pt_BR colloquial mode.

Edit: but I get the discussion is centered on 'too many'.

'Ela disse adeus demasiadas vezes'.

*I'm a natural pt_BR speaker. I would never say it this way in a conversation. Too perfect to be colloquial.

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

#215

Post by dmoy »

bitdivision wrote: post #161
avgcorrection wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> always wondered if the information rate would actually be the same

As a general rule of thumb, human spoken languages all communicate about 5 bytes per second of info. The limit seems to be not because of auditory processing or verbal issues, but rather how fast someone can process thoughts.

I don't know about latam vs Spain specifically, that would be interesting. Seems unlikely that it would be more varied than e.g. English, Italian, and Japanese, which all tend towards the same ~5Bps limit.

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

#216

Post by vladb38b »

oblio wrote: post #98
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…

Romanian: 11 Ea și-a luat adio de prea multe ori (înainte = before, optional). 9 Ea și-a luat adio excesiv. 8 Ea și-a luat adio prea mult.

Si-a luat ramas bun deja adeseori.

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

#217

Post by denton-scratch »

wunderland wrote: post #160
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.

Agreed; "she said goodbye too many times before" is grammatical. But it's temporally ambiguous. The sentence is reporting on a time in the past, a time when "her" utterances were even further in the past.

I suggested rephrasing prior to translation, to clarify the tense of "said".

As someone upthread noted, it's a song, so prosody is more important than grammar. But I think it's still an ugly construction.

[Edit] I'm not sure what tense it is; I'm a native English speaker, and I don't think I was ever taught the grammar of my own language. I don't think it's past-perfect/pluperfect; that would be "she has said" (she has finished saying it). Wikipedia disagrees, but doesn't say what tense "she has said" is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect

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

#218

Post by jakear »

benrutter wrote: post #58
Lio wrote: post #23

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…

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…

Somehow the context of the song hasn't been shared on the thread yet:

    Whispered goodbye as she got on a plane
    Never to return again
    ...
    This love has taken its toll on me
    She said goodbye too many times before
    And her heart is breaking in front of me
    And I have no choice 'cause I won't say goodbye anymore
Clearly "before" is needed to rhyme with "anymore". Also it is referencing the times she said "goodbye" before she said it this last time when she got on the plane.

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

#219

Post by viciousvoxel »

haste410 wrote: post #203
academia_hack wrote: post #100

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…

> Each verb on the first line has a "mate" on the second. Can you clarify what a "mate" is? What determines a word's "mate"? The position on the line? Their meaning?

Not parent but yes; related meanings (e.g. hate/torture, ask/know) and typically same part of speech (e.g. both verbs or both adjectives), and the lines having similar (but here reversed) sentence structure (another commenter posted the wiki link to Chiasmus which goes into more detail.

The structure we see here is x0 and y0, ...z0 / z1... y1 and x1.

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

#220

Post by maleldil »

Zecc wrote: post #205
Vox_Leone wrote: post #198

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"?

"muitas" is "many", "demasiadas" would be "too many". "demasiadas" works better in the context here, but I (Brazillian) don't think I've ever heard it spoken, only read.
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