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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?
#282As a native english speaker, I feel like "She'd said goodbye too many times before" better conveys the meaning for me.
Some instances of "had" can be elided without loss of meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...
Kind of like that that can be similarly strange
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_that_is_is_that_that_is_n...
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious about why you've added what I assume are stress marks in the Latin. I studied it (admittedly, a while back) all my way through school and have never once seen this used, including in this poem. In no way a criticism of me trying to make a thing about it - is it an American thing?
They’re length markers. There’s also the rarely used ˘ to show that a vowel be read short instead of long. At least in my gymnasium in Switzerland we had the length markers for all the words, from the very beginning, and in all texts we read and all grammar forms we learned.
Seems like a modern addition. I've seen quite a few Roman inscriptions in my life, and I don't remember ever noticing any such marker.
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the actual phrase he says may be completely different That's also true in English, in my experience. I've never heard someone express this phrase (or a variation) in conversation, but the sentiment is common. A typical phrasing in English would be more like "She always says she's done but she always comes back."
Ha, I've never really listened in to the rest of the words and kinda assumed the meaning was "she left many people" with "too many" indicating loneliness. TIL
yep, I somehow came up with ageless being saying goodbye to friends over the centuries
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#285I 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.
I'd probably bet on Latin cover
like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbEKIW3pUUk
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lin…
Completely agree. Catulus was sort of a talented incel-type imho. I remember his work being way more fun to read and translate but Ovid was obviously more brilliant and...poetic.
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#287If we're just trying to translate the literal meaning of this sentence from English to Latin, these are good answers. But I suspect that if we went back to ancient Rome and found someone experiencing the meaning behind these words (a guy talking about a girl who has said goodbye too many time, and he doesn't believe that it's going to be final this time either), the actual phrase he says may be completely different.…
The point you raise is one of the things most people -- professional translators, even -- get very, very wrong when translating (books, movie subtitles, game dialogue, you name it).
"How do you say 'phrase' in [target language]?" is more often than not a much worse approach than "What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?".
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#288As a native english speaker, I feel like "She'd said goodbye too many times before" better conveys the meaning for me.
Some instances of "had" can be elided without loss of meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h... Kind of like that that can be similarly strange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_that_is_is_that_that_is_n...
I'm not at all an expert on grammar, just know what sounds right to my ear. Can you more explicitly connect the 'had had' sentence to this example?
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some instances of "had" can be elided without loss of meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h... Kind of like that that can be similarly strange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_that_is_is_that_that_is_n...
I'm not at all an expert on grammar, just know what sounds right to my ear. Can you more explicitly connect the 'had had' sentence to this example?
OK. The punctuated version is:
> James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher
If you take the first clause:
> James, while John had had "had"
You could replace it with:
> James, while John had "had"
Similarly, most of the (non-quoted) instances of "had had" could be replaced with "had", keeping the meaning almost exactly the same. (edit: this is the point of the sentence. "had had" and "had" are almost equivalent, but the teacher happens to prefer "had had".) This is like the original, where "had said" can be contracted to "said" without loss of meaning, so
> She had said goodbye too many times before
is equivalent to:
> She said goodbye too many times before
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#290If we're just trying to translate the literal meaning of this sentence from English to Latin, these are good answers. But I suspect that if we went back to ancient Rome and found someone experiencing the meaning behind these words (a guy talking about a girl who has said goodbye too many time, and he doesn't believe that it's going to be final this time either), the actual phrase he says may be completely different.…
The point you raise is one of the things most people -- professional translators, even -- get very, very wrong when translating (books, movie subtitles, game dialogue, you name it). "How do you say 'phrase' in [target language]?" is more often than not a much worse approach than "What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?".
For anything remotely poetic (including song lyrics), I like to hear more literal translations, because the creative turns of phrase is is what makes them enjoyable.