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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?

#301

Post by jltsiren »

teleforce wrote: post #276

Fun facts, Grammar schools in the UK were originally schools created mainly to teach Latin grammar and currently there are 163 Grammar schools operating in the UK as academic oriented (or orientated per UK English grammar), secondary schools [1],[2]. You know that the language is hard when you have multitude of schools dedicated to teach its grammar. Latin has a reputation of a complex language with complicated gramm…

Latin grammar is literally trivial, because it was a part of the trivium in traditional liberal arts education.

You did not study the grammar in order to use the language but to understand the structure of it. You also studied logic to understand the structure of ideas and arguments, and rhetoric to communicate them. Then you proceeded to the quadrivium to study arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy.

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

#302

Post by alpinisme »

haberman wrote: post #290
lampiaio wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only that but poetic things are more or less by definition things that a native speaker would not say routinely (otherwise they wouldn’t be poetic). Even when they are fairly colloquial (as here), there’s got to be some twist of rhythm or aptness of phrasing that is singular and memorable.

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

#303

Post by canjobear »

jltsiren wrote: post #301
teleforce wrote: post #276

Fun facts, Grammar schools in the UK were originally schools created mainly to teach Latin grammar and currently there are 163 Grammar schools operating in the UK as academic oriented (or orientated per UK English grammar), secondary schools [1],[2]. You know that the language is hard when you have multitude of schools dedicated to teach its grammar. Latin has a reputation of a complex language with complicated gramm…

Latin grammar is literally trivial, because it was a part of the trivium in traditional liberal arts education. You did not study the grammar in order to use the language but to understand the structure of it. You also studied logic to understand the structure of ideas and arguments, and rhetoric to communicate them. Then you proceeded to the quadrivium to study arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy.

Understanding Latin was absolutely the goal of grammar schools in the time when most written educated discourse happened in Latin.

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

#304

Post by Jun8 »

bshimmin wrote: post #202
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…

Great comment! For anyone looking to learn a bit more about this, the "crossing" technique described above is called "chiasmus": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).

And, of course, speaking of Lesbia (traditionally identified as Clodia Metelli, otherwise known as Quadrantaria), one should mention her “sparrow” mentioned in Catullus 2: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/catul.... Reading that article again I saw a tidbit I missed before: “As Richard Hooper has recently pointed out, ‘in Egyptian hieroglyphics the determinative for “little, evil, bad” was … śerau, the sparrow’”. And so it is: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sparrow_(hiero....

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

#305

Post by schoen »

VikingCoder wrote: post #244
schoen wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want the vocative of "world" (MUNDE) and the singular imperative of "go" (I). The latter is a bit easy to confuse with the Roman numeral for the number one, though!

So...? X SCRIBE "SALVE MUNDE" XX I X

That looks plausible to me.

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

#306

Post by Tao3300 »

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

Nothing better captures the feeling of being put on the spot by ones Latin teacher.

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

#307

Post by Tao3300 »

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.

Maroon 5 lyrics in Latin and Unicode Ghost Kanjis. Midlife crisis, here I come!

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

#308

Post by leoc »

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…

If you listen to some podcasts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNbsJ-QimQo you should hopefully be able to maintain your Latin.

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

#309

Post by jltsiren »

canjobear wrote: post #303
jltsiren wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latin grammar is literally trivial, because it was a part of the trivium in traditional liberal arts education. You did not study the grammar in order to use the language but to understand the structure of it. You also studied logic to understand the structure of ideas and arguments, and rhetoric to communicate them. Then you proceeded to the quadrivium to study arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy.

Understanding Latin was absolutely the goal of grammar schools in the time when most written educated discourse happened in Latin.

It was, but that has nothing to do with name "grammar school". In the liberal arts tradition that goes back to the ancient Greece, you studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric to learn to think and argue properly. Those were considered prerequisites to learning anything real. Grammar was considered the most fundamental of the three, which is why it was taught in the lowest-level schools.

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

#310

Post by sam0x17 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #300
lampiaio wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?".

"What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?". It gets even trickier if you are translating fiction. If you are translating, say, Japanese anime/manga with a Japanese setting for an English-speaking audience you don't necessarily want the characters to sound like Americans or Brits or Canadians or what have you. So you may have to use language that Americans un…

What's funny about it though is as an English speaker who knows no Japanese but often enjoys reading subtitles, I'd much rather see the weird literal translation so I know "oh, this is some cool idiom in Japanese" rather than translating it to boring English idioms. Like I get much more out of the meaning when I see the raw original idiom literally translated, and I prefer that.

I think we take for granted that idioms from other cultures/languages are incomprehensible... often they make a lot of sense when literally translated even if they aren't a "thing" in the language to which they are being translated.

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