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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).
Yes, 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
syllable 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…
polish 7 (8) - Zbyt często się (już) żegnała Although it's possible to drop "się" if we don't care about the response to the woman, so i.e. she could write a letter with goodbyes, not caring/not receiving the response back: 7 - Za często już żegnała
the "before" at the end throws me off. I don't think there's an correct tense to properly get this across in Polish. "Kiedyś żegnała się zbyt często"? "Często" also kinda applies to frequency in time, not count, so a literal "zbyt wiele razy" feels better.
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).
Yes, I think similarly in Spanish would be `se despidió demasiado` or `se despidió demasiadas veces` if you want `too many times` rather than `too much`. Disclaimer: Spanish is not my first language. Does demais in portuguese mean too much, or too many times?
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.
However, traditional way of computing efficiency of compression would not be useful for a meaningful analysis of the efficiency of a language. Barring issues like having an ideal encoding to bits, or even having the concept of "efficiency" being rigorously defined, there are problems just from the outset.
Take context for example.
All useful compression methods have some sort of decompression key involved. This could be the dictionary, or the bitmap or the know-how (for cases like RLE). In natural langauges, the compression/decompression key is stored in a distributed fashion across the minds of a society.
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is a VERY efficient compression for what is presumably a very long story about two hunters who met at an island and fought a beast together, but it is only efficient to the people who speak that language. The "local" efficiency (to the population who speak the language) is very high, but the "global" efficiency isn't.
So we must account for efficiency in terms of the size of the compressed concept as well as the compression key. And from my experience, it's a sorta lumpy kinda world out there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trink's, wenn du dich traust! (Drink it if you dare.)
"Trink's doch!" has pretty much the same meaning, in the correct context. "Just drink it [... if you dare]"
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).
You lost the gender of the person though, which from my understanding is preserved in Latin with a verb suffix.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say: "She has said goodbye too many times before." Because it still has relevance for the present, it should be present perfect. Unless if course it's about finally quitting, then the past tense makes sense.
> "She has said goodbye too many times before." Yeah, that sounds OK. Probably better than my original suggestion. Or even the contracted "She's said goodbye too many times before".
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.
German has many of those moments. It's a brilliant language for very specific uses, like user manuals.
Do you have any examples where it really excels? In my experience English is quite a good language to describe complicated things rather simple and short.