[deleted]
How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
61–70 of 328 posts
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ca…
> the complexities on practice are insurmountable.
“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” begs to differ
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#63People 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.
I would also like to ask the HN folks how comes we have so smart LLMs nowadays yet still no really good machine translation to Latin.
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#64People 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.
I wondered what google translate would make of a dead language so I tried those phrases. Neither of them seem even close, so (as I don't speak Latin) I don't know whether the issue lies in google translate, the complexity of what's being portrayed, whether the phrases are too idiomatic, or whether these idioms would require context around them to translate correctly. "nimium valedīxit": He got too sick "totiēns valed…
ChatGPT does well (I gave it the additional info that the subject was female, but that will only change whether it chooses the pronoun he or she):
totiēns valedīxit: She said goodbye so many times.
nimium valedīxit: She said goodbye too much
https://chat.openai.com/share/6d564b0a-c613-4411-a656-735cd9...
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#65syllable count english 10 - She said goodbye too many times before latin 6 - nimium valedīxit polish 7 - Zbyt często się żegnała german 10 - Sie hat sich schon zu oft verabschiedet french 11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant italian 12 - Ha detto addio troppe volte prima portuguese 11 - despedira-se demasiadamente (user tail_exchange) 14 - Ela despediu-se demasiadas vezes antes (deepl) nb: the target sentence…
Spanish: Despidiose excesivamente. 10
Does this not lack the 'before then' nuance ?
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#66People 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.
I wondered what google translate would make of a dead language so I tried those phrases. Neither of them seem even close, so (as I don't speak Latin) I don't know whether the issue lies in google translate, the complexity of what's being portrayed, whether the phrases are too idiomatic, or whether these idioms would require context around them to translate correctly. "nimium valedīxit": He got too sick "totiēns valed…
That seems like a google translate issue, the word "valedīcō" seems to unambiguously mean bidding farewell (or giving a farewell speech): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedico#Latin, and valedīxit is unambiguously the "third-person singular perfect active indicative" of valedīcō (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedixit).
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#67People 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.
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 consensus is actually the three word answer “nimium saepe valedixit”), the Latin example has a 22:38 (11:19) ratio.
Of course, this is just considering alphabetic languages. If we look at SE Asian languages we will find more extreme examples. For instance, a google search led me to:
“If we're going the other way, it could be "伥", which Pleco gives as
the ghost of a man who fell a victim to a tiger, yet helps the tiger to devour others”
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/6ijiuw/lon...
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#68syllable count english 10 - She said goodbye too many times before latin 6 - nimium valedīxit polish 7 - Zbyt często się żegnała german 10 - Sie hat sich schon zu oft verabschiedet french 11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant italian 12 - Ha detto addio troppe volte prima portuguese 11 - despedira-se demasiadamente (user tail_exchange) 14 - Ela despediu-se demasiadas vezes antes (deepl) nb: the target sentence…
you can remove the `prima` from the italian version: it's implied by the use of past tense and it sounds really bad in italian.
if you want to emphasize the `before`, you can use: `ha già detto addio troppe volte` instead
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#69People 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 Polish language also has an insane amount of compression. Example, "to play": https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bcthjo/conjugation_o...
Re: How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?
#70Yes, 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.
Nitpick: it's etc for et cetera
It's "&c" – Latin ligatures are important, especially in a thread like this! ;-)