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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?

#261

Post by Metacelsus »

ajuc wrote: post #200
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

Polish "za" has so many uses, it's really mind-boggling (as someone learning Polish)

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

#262

Post by lr4444lr »

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.

People trusting the advice of a stranger over email to permanently etch their skin? What a world...

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

#263

Post by galangalalgol »

lr4444lr wrote: post #260

Eh... this is a really idiomatic expression in English. Maybe if you rummage Plautus or Terrence, perhaps even the epistolary corpus of Pliny or Cicero, you could chance upon something sentimentally accurate, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Grammatically accurate word for word reconstructions aren't really going to convey it.

Idiomatic enough that I, as a native speaker, didn't understand what was intended by the phrase outside of context.

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

#265

Post by prerok »

VikingCoder wrote: post #234

How am I the first person here to uselessly link to the Latin Lesson scene from the Life of Brian? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjOfQfxmTLQ

I was learning Latin at the time I watched that movie. Fell off the sofa, laughing, during that scene :)

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

#266

Post by whimsicalism »

ses1984 wrote: post #28
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…

Doesn’t adding the ‘d change it from past tense to passive voice past tense?

Not sure, but the phrasing without 'd reads as off to me, a native english speaker.

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

#267

Post by _aavaa_ »

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?

The thing missing is the context in which the sentence is used.

From the comments on stackexchange: "if the context refers to this person enough to make it clear who "she" is, it should also make it clear who "he/she/it/they" is."

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

#268

Post by whimsicalism »

bloak wrote: post #91
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…

> 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…

I don't know, as a speaker of American english to me it sounds wrong without "she'd."

"Did you already do it?" sounds perfectly normal to me on the other hand.

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

#269

Post by whimsicalism »

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).

> 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".

Maybe that is something some Americans might say, but it is certainly not the most natural way I would say it.

I would likely say "I wish you'd done X instead" or "I wish you'd X'd"

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