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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?

#221

Post by irrational »

Chris2048 wrote: post #208
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…

Couldn't you use "thus"?

I don’t think so. The first letter means “and” and the rest is the verb “to be”. In this case, the verb is in the Qal Sequential imperfect 3rd Person Masculine Singular form. Thus doesn’t have the same connotation.

Other translations are:

So it happened in the course of time

So it came about in the course of time

And in the process of time it came to pass

And it cometh to pass at the end of days

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

#222

Post by tail_exchange »

trgn wrote: post #144
tail_exchange wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true. It could also be used by a "he", so there is a bit of ambiguity.

I'm really curious, where is the gendered information in "valedixit"? I feel like the proposed translation misses that romantic weight by keeping the gender ambiguous. What am I missing?

I don't speak Latin, but according to my short research (aka googling), it does not distinguish between third-person masculine and feminine. So the ambiguity is also present in Latin.

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

#224

Post by jjtheblunt »

lopis wrote: post #71
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).

You lost the gender of the person though, which from my understanding is preserved in Latin with a verb suffix.

it is not encoded in the verb ending.

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

#225

Post by academia_hack »

viciousvoxel wrote: post #219
haste410 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exactly this! It gets even cooler in this example too because the meter for "Odi et amo" elided to "Od'et amo" directly parallels the scansion for "excrucior" (long syllable, short syllable, short syllable, long syllable). So the two concepts that start and end the poem (love+hate, and torture) are also linked by how they are pronounced. Incidentally, that linkage is also the message of the poem itself.

These two lines are basically just Catulus' being a complete show-off. And IMO, some of Ovid's work makes Catulus look like a bit of an amateur by comparison.

Classical latin poetry is like 10% being able to write down clever ideas and 90% showing off your grasp of grammar and vocabulary such that you can pose and solve incredibly difficult linguistic puzzles. I think Sanskrit is pretty similar in this respect too.

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

#226

Post by anbende »

stinos wrote: post #24
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.

One could also say that French is 'rather different', not better or more clear. Let alone superior (though I do not know where that claim came from).

If we’re talking about clarity I think there’s some merit to the claim. It has tense markers that English lacks which buys you information in the conjugation about tense, gender and speaker. And unlike other Latin languages you aren’t able to drop the subject and just rely on the verb to convey it which forces clarity one could argue. You get the best of both worlds for clarity though the worst of both worlds for conjugation complexity and overall verboseness.

At least that’s my attempt to defend the GP’s statement.

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

#227

Post by tuomosipola »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #150

I wonder if the original question -asking if a popular song lyric could be translated into Latin - was asked because someone wants a tattoo of it. I know a Latin teacher and she gets several emails a year from strangers asking her to translate phrases into Latin because they want them in a tattoo.

When I was the president of the society of Latin students, I got several emails asking for tattoo translations. I hope I got them right.

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

#228

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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).

You can do the same thing in English.

She said bye often.

5 syllables.

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

#229

Post by elliottkember »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #228
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).

You can do the same thing in English. She said bye often. 5 syllables.

"often" and "too many times" do not have the same meaning at all

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

#230

Post by ihm »

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?

There's huge variation in Latin American dialects, there's definitely no universal speed of speech.
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