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.
The two-word phrase that was offered in the answer (nimium saepe) was actually not a full answer, it was only for "too many times". The answer actually did not, well.. answer the actual question.
Are you sure? My understanding is that the two words are the full sentence.
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?
I honestly don't know but to me it sounds like present tense.
I'd be interested to know though. It just reads as ...wrong to me.
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.
The two-word phrase that was offered in the answer (nimium saepe) was actually not a full answer, it was only for "too many times". The answer actually did not, well.. answer the actual question.
it... did? Their final answer is:
> nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit: "she bade farewell too much before" or "she bade farewell so many times before".
nimium/totiēns conveying "too many times before" and "valedīxit" conveying "she said goodbye".
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.
Oh yes! It touches language and compression, both dear subjects to programmers. If the accepted answer stands, that's remarkable. I wonder how one could measure a language efficiency. Maybe syllable count ? But one would need a sort of assembly to translate to and verify that a sentence computes the intended information.
The problem is that there are complex concepts that translate to a single syllable in some languages but requires a lot of context or explanation in other languages. Would these be "single instructions" or multiple? Then when you really break it down, many concepts are used grammatically but are not required based on their context. Should you count that as extraneous or not? An example is that some languages use a case system to indicate the epistemology of a statement, how the speaker knew that information (i.e. saw it first hand, heard it second hand, or saw evidence of it). Depending on the context, this may be vital or extraneous. Therefore the same statement that is "compressed" to remove useless information would be compressed two different ways. That doesn't seem feasible. All of this is to say, this sounds good in theory, but the complexities on practice are insurmountable.
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.
The two-word phrase that was offered in the answer (nimium saepe) was actually not a full answer, it was only for "too many times". The answer actually did not, well.. answer the actual question.
The top answer offers this 2 word solution: nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit