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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?

#91

Post by bloak »

Lio wrote: post #23

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…

> Shouldn't it be "she'd" past tense?

Yes, probably (I don't know the context), but it seems to me that in colloquial US English the traditional complex tense system has been somewhat simplified: perhaps another example of the historical influence of Germans and other non-native speakers in the US. I'm British, of course, so I don't really know what I'm talking about here but I think I've heard native speakers of US English say things that are just wrong, because of the choice of verb tense, in any form of British English that I am familiar with: things like "Did you already do it?", though I can't guarantee that's a good example. Of course it could be that the verb system of colloquial US English is just as complex as the verb system of British English but the subtleties pass me by: I just notice the things that to me seem wrong, like failing to distinguish between "Did you do" and "Have you done".

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

#92

Post by jdmichal »

chewxy wrote: post #76
alcover wrote: post #22

Earlier 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.

You could measure the efficiency of a language by computing how many bits are required to store the semantics of a word/phrase/sentence losslessly. Assuming ideal encoding to bits of course. Think of things like perplexity and the like. 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 enco…

> You could measure the efficiency of a language by computing how many bits are required to store the semantics of a word/phrase/sentence losslessly. Assuming ideal encoding to bits of course. Think of things like perplexity and the like.

This has been done! The answer is about 39 bits a second.

https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...

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

#93

Post by dejj »

alcover wrote: post #46

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…

Literal Code Golf.

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

#94

Post by jiofj »

erremerre wrote: post #59
alcover wrote: post #46

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…

Spanish: Despidiose excesivamente. 10

That's too lossy, and "despidiose" is trying too hard.

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

#95

Post by quickthrower2 »

alcover wrote: post #22
dTal wrote: post #7

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.

Lossy compression though. The songs meaning was lost because “too many times” is very important to make sense of the lyrics that follows.

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

#96

Post by tsukikage »

chewxy wrote: post #76
alcover wrote: post #22

Earlier 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.

You could measure the efficiency of a language by computing how many bits are required to store the semantics of a word/phrase/sentence losslessly. Assuming ideal encoding to bits of course. Think of things like perplexity and the like. 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 enco…

It is customary, when comparing performance of compression algorithms, to include the size of the tool needed for decompression in the compression benchmarks, since otherwise one can simply smuggle the uncompressed data in the decompression tool.

ISTM a similar principle would need to apply here: learning the "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" language would involve absorbing many volumes of history and mythology where for the usual sort of language a dictionary, grammar reference and maybe a book of common idioms would suffice.

Whatever metric is used to compare languages for efficiency should reflect this.

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

#97

Post by throw0101c »

alcover wrote: post #22
dTal wrote: post #7

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.

> I wonder how one could measure a language efficiency.

An area of active research:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/co...

* https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2020-...

A constructed language:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

* Via: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/zyi8q/what_is_...

Doing a search for "language information entropy" also gives back a number of results.

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

#98

Post by oblio »

alcover wrote: post #46

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…

Romanian:

11

Ea și-a luat adio de prea multe ori (înainte = before, optional).

9

Ea și-a luat adio excesiv.

8

Ea și-a luat adio prea mult.

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

#99

Post by coliveira »

dTal wrote: post #7

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.

Latin is dramatically efficient in expressing meaning because it has a grammar that is several times more complex than english. On the other hand, most of latin grammar can be thought as adding prefixes and suffixes to root words.

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

#100

Post by academia_hack »

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 structuring ordering of the words conveys some additional meaning. This can be done in English too, but classical Latin is almost made for it.

For example, Catulus 85:

"Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris.

Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior."

The translation Wikipedia gives is: "I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.

I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured."

But there is so much brilliance in the structure of the poem that translation cannot really encapsulate. The last word "excrucior" (I am crucified) references a relationship between the structure of the first and second line. Each verb on the first line has a "mate" on the second. For example: odi (I hate)excrucior (I am tortured), requires (you ask) nescio (I know). If you draw lines connecting these mates to each other, they form a number of crosses - referencing the "crux" in "excrucior". The poem literally depicts the torture instrument that is Catulus' love.

Even more remarkably, this poem follows a strict metrical standard dictating the order of long and short syllables: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegiac_couplet and it achieves this meter in part due to the use of elision in the opening of the poem, where two vowel sounds get merged due to the ordering of words. "Odi et Amo" is read as "Odet Amo" as the the love and hate crush together and evoke that sense of pressure and torment that underlies the couplet.

Classical Latin had so much capacity for structural complexity that is really remarkable. It's not just that you can say more stuff with less words, but that the allocation of information in the grammar allows for entirely different expressions than you could make if word order dictated meaning.

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