How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?(latin.stackexchange.com) |
How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?(latin.stackexchange.com) |
You can translate the phrase "She said goodbye too many times before" into Latin as "Dixit vale saepe nimis antea".
Yes, in Latin, you can say "multum vale" to mean "goodbye many times" or "vale nimis" to mean "goodbye too much"
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...
Nimium saepe valedixit is 9 syllables and, as frequently noted on the page, does not attempt to translate the entire English source text, which is 10 syllables. It was kind of surreal reading the answers, since none of them attempt to determine what the English lyric means, and it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence. You need to determine what it means before you try to translate it into another language.
I just listened to the song (well, the first three verses, which is all of the verses) while looking at a printout of the lyrics, and I can't determine what that line in the chorus is supposed to mean. It's very strange grammar:
This love has taken its toll on me
She said goodbye too many times before
Her heart is breaking in front of me
And I have no choice
'Cause I won't say goodbye anymore
The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense. There is no indication anywhere in the song, as far as I can see, of what "before" refers to.
So my instinct is to essentially write off the possibility of translating the lyric with the aphorism "garbage in, garbage out".
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.
Translation is a process which both erases information and introduces new information. Any comparison of languages which tries to evaluate which languages are more compact has to work with some assumptions about what information should be conveyed. A statistical distribution of language-independent messages. But when you choose a distribution, you’re encoding your biases.
Not saying that language efficiency is a bunk concept, just that it’s a thorny, difficult concept to quantify. Same is true of data compression algorithms—there is no such thing as an absolute scale for Kolmogorov complexity, for the same reasons.
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.
In an optimally breve language the meaning of a text could completely flip when a single letter/syllable/phoneme is changed. That, in turn, means listeners have to hear every letter/syllable/phoneme perfectly.
Interestingly, natural languages already have a bit of both.
As an example, if you skim-read a text and restart at “He said she wasn’t there anymore”, there are 3 ‘back references’ in that sentence that require you to look back in the text to find the meaning of.
Also, a paragraph’s meaning can change by adding the sentence “Just joking.” Or even a simple “Not.”.
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.
Similar thing I’ve noticed with the south indian language - Malayalam, just try to pronounce the name of the city - Thiruvananthapuram, local speakers would pronounce it with roughly the same speed as “London”, and would enunciate every syllable - its crazy.
https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...
For example, mandarin or japanese can be very short on the character count. However, this increases character complexity and makes the languages harder to learn. On the other hand, large parts of english tend to be simple to learn.
"nimium valedīxit": He got too sick
"totiēns valedīxit": He was always well
Edit: Playing around with google translate, "nim valedīxit" translates to He said goodbye. But "valedīxit" translates to Said goodbye. "Nimium" translates to Too many
So somewhere in that complexity it does seem to be that those two words have a meaning that build off eachother for their meaning, but google is considering it literally
If anyone has an explanation for these phrases rather than my guess work, I'd love to hear them!
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...
Because while "classical Latin" was capable of doing those antics, it was limited for day to day use. Phrasal and noun endings were complicated and wouldn't play well with day to day usage
Finnish doesn’t have gender pronouns so you can’t distinguish between he and she in most contexts. Adding that distinction in an idiomatic way would make the translation quite a bit longer.
The ancient languages like Old Arabic, Old Hebrew, and Latin was the key to understanding language in general. I think Esperante might also be key to deducing language.
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.
Eng: "I dare you to drink that"
Deu: "Ich fordere dich heraus, das zu trinken."
> So I would cut this down to something like nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit: "she bade farewell too much before" or "she bade farewell so many times before".
Édit: I mean in the last paragraph of the answer.
> 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".
It's a single word sentence with no vowels, pronounced as [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ] (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C... ).
It's formed from: xł- (“have”) + p̓x̣ʷłt (“bunchberry”) + -łp (“plant”) + -łł (pluperfect marker) + -s (possessive marker) + kʷc̓ (of uncertain function)
Here someone seeks to do for Maroon 5's This Love what has been done for Greenday's Boulevard of Broken Dreams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
I look forward to near future efforts with the Sleaford Mods' Blog Maggot.
People upvoted.
The distinction of what a word is, is also pretty interesting to think about. When I read some old Dutch stories back in high school, I noticed the writers would glue together words that I would consider to be completely separate. The Latin word "quodsi" from the second answer is obviously a combination of "quod" and "si", two separate words, but "nimium saepe" isn't combined into "nimiumsaepe" despite Cicero often using those words together. "valedīxit" is just "vale" and "dīxit" smashed together into a single verb.
The proposed "illa nimium valedīxit" (from combining both answers, to include the stressed gender of the person in question) can be interpreted literally as "she overly goodbyesaid". You can derive the same meaning from reordering the words, but it won't sound as poetic.
I don't think English or French are more exacting and clear per se, I think that's more of a cultural thing for native speakers. Compare posh British English speakers to American English speakers; the exact same words can be used to either say something directly ("very interesting") or to hide complete disagreement behind a nice expression ("very interesting").
I wouldn't consider French to be any better or worse than English. It's just another language. Though, with the exception of the useless ^ here and there to indicate a missing s, French spelling matches pronunciation a lot better at least.
/r/badlinguistics nonsense.
At least that’s my attempt to defend the GP’s statement.
Other translations are:
So it happened in the course of time
So it came about in the course of time
And in the process of time it came to pass
And it cometh to pass at the end of days
This has been done! The answer is about 39 bits a second.
https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...
I suppose image macros/memes are the modern equivalent. Social context enables readers to "decompress" the meme.
[Drake top]: "Two hunters who met at an island and fought a beast together"
[Drake bottom]: "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"
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.
No magic but plain agglutination, and I am sure this should be possible in languages like Finnish too...
English has (at least) four constructs to talk about the past: "he went", "he was going", "he has gone", and "he used to go". All four mean something clearly different. French meanwhile only has "il allait" and "il est allé" (and, technically "il alla" though nowadays that is basically only used in writing and its meaning is not clearly distinguishable from that of "il est allé").
It's easy to find examples of distinctions made by French that English doesn't make, and vice versa. That doesn't mean that either language, overall, tends to express concepts more precisely than the other.
When translating for fun, I've often run into a choice between:
- Preserving the author's meaning as literally as possible.
- Preserving the author's style.
A translation can be literally very accurate, while destroying everything that made the original work charming. Or it might preserve the feel and the flavor of the original work, but skim over a lot of the details. A really good translation captures more of both, with fewer trade-offs.
Jorge Luis Borges encouraged his translators to improve upon his original work, if possible. He worked extensively with Di Giovanni, one of his translators, debating the best way to capture certain phrases in English: https://medium.com/@michael.marcus/dear-mr-borges-which-tran... His preference was almost always to capture the "feel" of the work, rather than a strictly literal translation.
I have an odd book, which contains three copies of the same story: An original in English, a French translation, and then a translation back into English by a new translator. The French version definitely loses something, and the second English version loses a bit more. But in the second English version, there is an occasional delightful turn of phrase, something that's briefly better than the original version. Translation is hard.
"Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful."
I'm not sure if the Latin translation as it is captures that, or if you'd go for something more like "valedīxisse nimium valedīxit", "she said goodbye having said goodbye too much"; I kind of like that because then you're saying goodbye twice in the same line.
Exactly (or at the time). Many submissions here attain shortness by eliding this important precision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless_(1960_film)#Closing...
That’s why the translations of Asterix are so impressive.
There's an essay I enjoyed by Douglas Hofstadter which is all about this, though from an artistic POV without much (any?) information science. Translator, Trader. The title itself is a fun bit of translational wordplay on "traduttore, traditore."
then don't these other langs do a 'bad job' at compression ?
> That doesn't seem feasible
In general maybe not. But for some restricted 'assembly' ?
"The cat is on the table" has no ambiguity. And in some langs like Polish it compresses better : "Kot jest na stole" (Cat is on table), same info, better syllable-wise compression (5 vs 7).
Kanji look very compressed, and can convey a lot in a single character, but if there isn't one for your needs things can get ugly. Whereas English speakers find it much easier to borrow, shorten, abbreviate, or make up words for convenience.
In Turkish if you say kedi you mean the cat. The copula is in the third person is conveyed by an empty word at the end of a sentence.
Masada bir kedi var.
There is a cat on the table. A cat is on the table. A cat is said as one cat = bir kedi.
*Bir kedi masada.
Doesn’t work. This says a cat on the table. It’s an ellipsis.
“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” begs to differ
For instance, your assumption that the definite "the cat" is being used idiomatically like so: this sentence, used in the manner you offer, might be used in conversation might occur in a farmhouse somewhere between an old man and woman who have lived together in this house for a long time, i.e. American Gothic. There's a vast amount of shared information and a perception of very little ambiguity held by both the speaker and the listener (whether correct or mistaken!). Any of those might fail. Furthermore, to use this sentence in English unadorned by context requires that both the speaker and listener have a shared reference to _what_ cat is being referred to by the definite article, "the". This very well might come with an unambiguous default in other languages!
Translation only gets more complicated from this.
Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
> The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense.
But it's a song. Prosody can't be held to the same strict rules of tense consistency (or other grammatical rules) as prose. And flipping tenses between lines is hardly an uncommon feature of songwriting. Take, for example, Leonard Cohen's "Boogie Street":
A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it's time to go,
I tidied up the kitchenette,
I tuned the old Banjo.
I'm wanted at the traffic jam
and so on.
She started her new life
Ten dollars in debt
That's all it took to get started back then
A trip to the courthouse across the state line
No one could stop her
She'd made up her mind
He was eighteen
And she wasn't
But she said she was / and never thought twice
And came back home as my daddy's wife
She just shook her head
When her mama said "Are you sure he's the one?"
But she was
Here we see some fairly complex temporal structure handled fluently, with no problems of any kind. The writing is better.
>> it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an isolated sentence
> Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
The use of the simple past tense is not compatible with the sense of before that everyone here is trying to assign.
And the first line is past tense, just like the second.
Edit: Reading all of the lyrics they were sleeping together, she fell in love with him so he broke it off
This is a somewhat complex issue, so please bear with me.
First, we can dispense with the idea that the tense of the first line is "just like the second". They are different and the difference is quite significant.
Whether the first line should be called "past tense" or "present tense" is more of a fussy terminological issue. There are two concepts in linguistics which have to do with how the verb relates to a timeline:
- "Tense" has to do with whether the action takes place before, during, or after whatever time would be referred to by the word "now".
- "Aspect" has to do with the temporal structure of the action itself, rather than its position relative to a "camera" placed at "now": maybe the action occurs at an indivisible point in time ("That's when I noticed the rabbit"); maybe it takes place continuously over an extended duration ("I've been reading for thirty minutes"); maybe it occurs at a large number of separate points within a continuous window ("I used to visit the donut shop every day after school")
Except I used the wrong words just now. "Tense" and "aspect" are terms from syntax, and you can determine them purely by looking at the form of the verb. The definitions I gave belong to semantics: when I said "tense", I should have said "time", and I'm not sure what the semantics-specific term for the quality related to aspect is. Anyway, we name the verb forms, "tense" and "aspect", according to whether they primarily correspond with those semantic definitions.
Except, again, there's a little more to it. We'd like to name the verb forms according to this distinction, but there is a long tradition in Latin scholarship of referring to both of those distinctions by the same name, "tense", and this bled over into English.
So we can say the following about line 1 and line 2:
- Line 1 is, semantically, focused on the present. It is making a claim about "now".
- The verb is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "perfect tense"; according to the tense/aspect distinction described above, it is present tense (reflected in the form of have), indicating that we are talking about "now", and perfect aspect (reflected in the fact that have is used at all), indicating that the action described ("taking a toll") is already finished.
- Line 2 is semantically focused on the past. It is making a claim about some time before "now".
- The verb in line 2 is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "simple past" or "preterite" tense. The aspect is not clear, because the English preterite tense is used for multiple different verbal semantic aspects.
The fact that line 2 is talking about the past when the rest of the chorus is talking about the present is very strange.
Is English your native language? I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me.
“Before” is a temporal indicator. You could replace it with another temporal indicator and the phrase would still make sense, For example, “She said goodbye too many times today”. You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
He's lamenting a romance that's been difficult for him. Before now, during the difficult relationship, she said goodbye or left him too many times, causing the difficulty and toll it has taken on him.
That is a strong possibility. It doesn't solve the problem with the line; to make sense, it should say she's said goodbye too many times before.
> It sounds clear to me: the girl has previously tried to break up many times, so now he is breaking up with her.
That is not so strong; the first verse is phrased in a way that suggests she is leaving him, not the other way around:
I was so high, I did not recognize
The fire burning in her eyes
The chaos that controlled my mind
Whispered goodbye as she got on a plane
Never to return again but always in my heart, oh
(On first impression, I assumed this verse meant that the girl was dead, but she could just be leaving.)
> I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me.
It is a common phenomenon for people to claim that sentences are perfectly clear to them when, objectively, those sentences do not have a meaning at all. On Language Log they occasionally discuss "Escher sentences", with the prototype example being "More people have been to France than I have".
> “Before” is a temporal indicator. You could replace it with another temporal indicator and the phrase would still make sense, For example, “She said goodbye too many times today”. You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
Except I can see what's happening with "She said goodbye too many times today." That sentence will be followed up with some explanation of the consequences of having said goodbye too many times.
In the chorus, the intent might have been that the line "she said goodbye too many times before" is an explanation of the preceding line (that's how people are interpreting it here). Or the line might just have been thrown in with no rhyme or reason, completely disconnected from the rest of the song. But regardless of the intent, the line has failed to connect to the sentence before it or the sentence after it, which means that we cannot determine what it's trying to say.
> You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.
Moving back to this, it's necessary to ask what exactly "before" is referring to because the question came up of whether and how it should be represented in the Latin translation. It might conceivably refer to "before now" (in which case the suggestion of Latin perfect tense is fine), "before some point identified by the context" (you'd want pluperfect, if the point was in the past, or future perfect if the point was in the future [or of course perfect if the point is "now"]), or "before some specific event" (you'd want the preposition ante, and you'd also need to mention the event).
"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?".
So you may have to use language that Americans understand, but still make them sound Japanese. Somehow.
That's also true in English, in my experience. I've never heard someone express this phrase (or a variation) in conversation, but the sentiment is common.
A typical phrasing in English would be more like "She always says she's done but she always comes back."
Interestingly, based on School Standards and Framework Act 1998, no new maintained grammar schools can be opened [3].
[1] Grammar school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school
[2] List of grammar schools in England:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
[3] Grammar School Statistics:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
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.
BTW żegnała encodes the gender. If it was he it would be żegnał. So arguably it's more compressed than latin.
BTW2 the real compression happens in conditionals żegnałaby = she would have said goodbye
Does demais in portuguese mean too much, or too many times?
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.
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.
like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbEKIW3pUUk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...
Kind of like that that can be similarly strange
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_that_is_is_that_that_is_n...
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 where someone's left out a closing tag. :P
The weird one is that Latin American Spanish is spoken much slower, but with the same information per syllable (presumably). I always wondered if the information rate would actually be the same for Spanish (LATAM) and Spanish (Spain) - my suspicion is that it's lower in LATAM. Perhaps pauses and connective words could account for the difference though?
I was hoping our friends on StackExchange could have found a Latin equivalent that fits the number of syllables of the English version, or it won't help if the original translation request was motivated by an upcoming Latin karaoke... not that machine translation was any better.
Dixit Google Translatum:
Tam altus eram, non agnovi
Ignis ardens in oculis eius
Chaos gubernans mentem meam
Vale quod illa surrexit in planum susurrabant
Numquam iterum redi, sed semper in corde meo, heu
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et non optio
'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
Whoa?
Whoa?
Whoa?
Conatus sum optimum appetitum pascere
Serva eam omni nocte venire
Tam difficile est ut ei satisfiat, oh
Tenentur ludens amore sicut erat sicut ludus
Simulans idem
Deinde conversus et iterum discede, sed uh-oh
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et non optio
'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
Whoa?
Whoa?
Whoa?
Fracta haec figam, alis fractis reparabo tuis
Et fac omnia recte (saxum est, ita bene)
Premuntur coxis tuis, ego digitos deprimo
Omnis inch ex vobis
Quia scio quod vis ut faciam
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Her breakin cor 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et non optio
'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Et cor meum est breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et illa etiam pluries ante vale dixit
Hic amor accepit portorium in me
Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
Et non optio
'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
...
X SCRIBE "SALVE MUNDI"
XX ITE X
or something like that?
X SCRIBE "SALVE MUNDE"
XX I X
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)
رَحلِتَك
Because we can use the form of the verb that both disparagingly implies "sends you away", in the imperative form to imply what's actually being requested (obedience of repetition). Of course, it's not perfect, but definitely easily doable with 2.
ودعت كثيرا
قالت وداعا كثيرا
ودعت مرارا
I'm Iraqi but I'm by no means an Arabic expert, I'm pretty sure there is a better way to give a more accurate expression for this in Arabic
Actual native speakers are all dead. It's poetry, not conversational. The answers looked to poets.
She lies goodbye.
Oft repeated, her exits depleted.
So first alter it to "She HAD said goodbye too many times before". Then it's essier to translate correctly.
I suggested rephrasing prior to translation, to clarify the tense of "said".
As someone upthread noted, it's a song, so prosody is more important than grammar. But I think it's still an ugly construction.
[Edit] I'm not sure what tense it is; I'm a native English speaker, and I don't think I was ever taught the grammar of my own language. I don't think it's past-perfect/pluperfect; that would be "she has said" (she has finished saying it). Wikipedia disagrees, but doesn't say what tense "she has said" is.
You could also use the present perfect, "she has said goodbye too many times before", which sounds slightly better to me, but is again a different tense and implies the goodbye-saying is an ongoing phenomenon. If it's all in the past, this tense would be wrong.
(*) if you drop the pronoun you can even sing the Latin lyrics on the same division. :)
In colloquial pt_BR that would be 'Ela disse adeus muitas vezes [antes]'
She said bye often.
5 syllables.
Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).
Can you clarify what a "mate" is? What determines a word's "mate"? The position on the line? Their meaning?
The structure we see here is x0 and y0, ...z0 / z1... y1 and x1.
Catullus of course is one of the masters. There is also the "da mi basia mille deinde centum..." that has the structure of an abacus
At least in my gymnasium in Switzerland we had the length markers for all the words, from the very beginning, and in all texts we read and all grammar forms we learned.
Are there any resources that you have enjoyed over the years for learning Latin or engaging in material written in Latin?
"She had said goodbye too many times before" means, at some point in the past, it was the case that she had previously said goodbye too many times. I think this is the intended meaning.
"She said goodbye too many times before" I don't think makes sense if you're extremely literal about it, since I can't see what "before" would track to without the embedded past.
The grammatically correct versions I can come up with are: - She had (or she'd) said goodbye too many times before. - She said goodbye too many times. - She said, "Goodbye too many times before".
Disclaimer: I do get that these are all worse song lyrics and that nobody had any problem understanding the intended meaning of the example sentence, which is sort of the goal of grammar.
It would grammatically work if you interpreted 'said' as a habitual action.
"Before [the etiquette training], she said 'goodbye' too many times. [Now, she says it just once.]"
In the context of the song, I think the habitual interpretation makes sense; the lyrics speak of trying to break the pattern of a dysfunctional relationship. This also works in that "said goodbye" has figurative intent (meaning 'left the relationship') over its literal meaning of verbally expressing one's departure.
Whispered goodbye as she got on a plane
Never to return again
...
This love has taken its toll on me
She said goodbye too many times before
And her heart is breaking in front of me
And I have no choice 'cause I won't say goodbye anymore
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".
Perfect tense is common. Future is occasionally avoided like above. Pluperfect and future perfect are almost never used, and most speakers would convey that meaning a different way. E.g. "I'll visit the store before then" rather than "I'll have visited the store". There is also some pseudo future tenses related to "going/gonna" (e.g. "I'm going to do that").
I think tenses are probably taught in some schools, but I didn't learn any of this until I took other languages. The average US English speaker probably doesn't know the names of all the tenses and doesn't even know what subjunctive, indicative, etc. mean.
"Did you already do it?" sounds perfectly normal to me on the other hand.
Passive past would be something like "Goodbye had been said too many times before [by her]"
In active voice, the subject does something to the object.
In passive voice, the object is affected [by the subject]. (I wanted to write "is done something to" instead of "affected", but that feels ugly - the issue with affected is that it is also an adjective; I really mean the past participle here)
The object becomes the subject, and vice versa. The be auxiliary needs to be present. If be is not here, it ain't passive. If be is here… be can be used in active voice so you can't know for sure, but if there's a "by ..." clause, or if adding one feels natural, that a good hint.
The intent of the passive voice is usually to focus on the object or the action, of de-emphasis the subject, of even to drop it because it's not important, it's redundant or even to create some suspense regarding who performed the action.
(English is a second language to me, though what I wrote completely applies to my first language too)
I'd be interested to know though. It just reads as ...wrong to me.
I guess it might be an English dialect thing.
11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant
Which got me:
11 - Elle salua excessivement avant
Still as many syllable (4) but less words (from 8 to 4) which might be easier to read.
That would not mean anything to a French speaker I'm afraid. "Saluer" is seldom used. It tends to mean "saying hello" or saluting someone in passing, more than "saying goodbye".
Elle a dit au revoir tellement souvent would work.
Better: Elle a dit adieu tellement souvent. Not the exact same meaning, but confers an undertone of dishonesty, as "adieu" should typically be said only once (it means you don't expect to see the other person ever again, except maybe in some afterlife).
Even better IMHO: Elle dit adieu si souvent. Present instead of past. A little farther from the original, but shorter and with a little more punch. It now implies it's something she does all the time.
In yours, "salua" would likely pass as a greeting, while "excessivement" would rather refer to the silly moves she made. Definitely harder to read for me.
I agree the "before" is the hard part to get right, I process "too many times before" as "too many times already", emphasis on reaching that number of times, given the song's context. Maybe we should treat "said […] before" as a smoothest form of "had said […]" to sing.
I'd go for "Elle a tant de fois dit au revoir" (9 syllabes).
Change my French mind.
I'd say (considering the context, the meaning is that she "told me goodbye" too many times before): Elle m'a trop dit au revoir.
That's 6 syllables (7 if you pronounce the schwa) and I think that's close enough to what Maroon 5 mean in their song.
Elle m'a trop quitté could work as well, with 5 syllables. I don't think you can get shorter than that, each word here seems necessary and as small as can be, to me.
If you can spare a few syllables, "déjà trop" or "trop souvent" would make these sentences much more natural.
I would go for this one. child comments suggest "tant", but this means "so many times" and not "too many times" (another way to say it would be "si souvent"). Adding "avant" sounds very wrong, but maybe it does in English too, I don't know.
You could use "par le passé": "Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent par le passé". This sounds more natural to me.
> Elle salua excessivement avant
Nice gulf :-) Now, the passé simple ("simple past") tense does not sound right for two reasons:
- It's never used when speaking, only in writing, and even then, only if you want to write a novel or something.
- This tense also refer to a one-off event. Like, one day at a particular time she said goodbye too many times in a row, or something. I would not assume a one-off event here.
"Zuviele Abschiede von ihr" - 8
"Ihre zuvielen Abschiede" - 8
"[Sie] verabschiedete sich zu oft" - 8-9
If you accept "trennen" ("separate") for "saying goodbye", you can do
"[Sie] trennte sich zu oft" - 5-6
If you accept "[weg]gehen" (go [away]) for "saying goodbye", you can also do "[Sie] ging zu oft [weg]" - 3-5
The "Sie" (she) is optional, but leaving it out sounds hurried and informal.
The literal translation also isn't very idiomatic imho, I'd rather expect to hear one of the latter ones if it was really about separations and going away, the former phrasing suggests more something of literally saying too many greetings.
And no, you can't omit "sie", German is not a Romantic language and the pronoun is required even if the verb has to match it by case anyway.
I'd say your examples are more than "a little" cheating. Most of these are incomprehensible or completely fail to deliver the same idea as the original. You can truncate sentences in poetry but at some point you just end up with disjointed fragments.
Despidiose excesivamente. 10
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.
If you want to include "before" (which Lating skipped): "Żegnała już za często"
slovak
7 - Priveľa sa lúčila
8 (with "before"/"already") - Priveľa sa už lúčilaAlthough 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.
> James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher
If you take the first clause:
> James, while John had had "had"
You could replace it with:
> James, while John had "had"
Similarly, most of the (non-quoted) instances of "had had" could be replaced with "had", keeping the meaning almost exactly the same. (edit: this is the point of the sentence. "had had" and "had" are almost equivalent, but the teacher happens to prefer "had had".) This is like the original, where "had said" can be contracted to "said" without loss of meaning, so
> She had said goodbye too many times before
is equivalent to:
> She said goodbye too many times before
Kolor - color Farba - paint Barwa - hue
Also Polish is surprisingly similar to Sanskrit, for example only recently I realized that budzik (alarm clock) pobudka (waking up someone as a noun) and all related bud- words have the same word root as Buddha (the awaken one). Blew my mind :)
I'm not sure if those are still in generic use but when I lived there long ago these were Western brands that you simply could not buy in Poland and so the brand names became stand-ins for the objects themselves.
The Buddha reference is hilarious!
In the song, "before" is an adverb referring to the current time in the story, which does not impact the goodbye-saying.
I can only make yours scan if I interpret it as "She said goodbye too many times before... I stopped taking her back.
Maybe, but still a valid pronominal verb.
I could be, but it wouldn't sound natural in pt_BR colloquial mode.
'Ela disse adeus demasiadas vezes'.
*I'm a natural pt_BR speaker. I would never say it this way in a conversation. Too perfect to be colloquial.
Edit: Reading the meaning of the song, I'd say "dijo adios demasiadas veces", as it stays closer to the original meaning.
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.
For some reason, it's fine to lose most of the meaning when translating to Portuguese or Latin for simplification - but it's not okay to just simplify in English.
One thing you should consider is that, in English, you cannot omit the "she" pronoun without making the sentence incorrect or unclear, since modern English does not have declensions for the grammatical person. But in other languages it is not only correct, but speakers do drop the pronouns when they speak. This is what the commenter was referring to when they said "That translation strikes me as overly literal, trying to keep a match for each English word. I'd go more idiomatic with this.".
I agree that the translation I provided is not 100% word-for-word perfect, since it drops a detail while trying to maintain the original message and compress it as much as possible, but saying that it lost most of its meaning is very unfair.
The actual inscriptions use heavy abbreviations, which we resolve in our text. And then we also disambiguate V into v and u. And as a bonus we often add the length markers.
So we do inscription -> cleaned Latin text.
And the cleaned text is given to students.
These two lines are basically just Catulus' being a complete show-off. And IMO, some of Ovid's work makes Catulus look like a bit of an amateur by comparison.
Classical latin poetry is like 10% being able to write down clever ideas and 90% showing off your grasp of grammar and vocabulary such that you can pose and solve incredibly difficult linguistic puzzles. I think Sanskrit is pretty similar in this respect too.
Nice! And sounds better.
To be nitpicking, I'd propose "Elle a tant dit au revoir avant" (9 also), which retains the original 'before'.
You could also insert déjà, which conveys the notion of before: Elle a déjà tant dit adieu. Well, this means so many times and not too many times, so you could say: Elle a déjà trop dit adieu (8). This could also be directly translated as she's already said goodbye too much. You can drop already/déjà, but lowers drops the emphasis on before. If you do so, Elle disait tant adieu (6) works.
Me and you, we've known each other
Yeah, ever since we were sixteen
I wished I would have known
I wished I could have called you
Just to say "Goodbye, Bobby Jean"Maybe that is something some Americans might say, but it is certainly not the most natural way I would say it.
I would likely say "I wish you'd done X instead" or "I wish you'd X'd"
From the comments on stackexchange: "if the context refers to this person enough to make it clear who "she" is, it should also make it clear who "he/she/it/they" is."
As a general rule of thumb, human spoken languages all communicate about 5 bytes per second of info. The limit seems to be not because of auditory processing or verbal issues, but rather how fast someone can process thoughts.
I don't know about latam vs Spain specifically, that would be interesting. Seems unlikely that it would be more varied than e.g. English, Italian, and Japanese, which all tend towards the same ~5Bps limit.
Do you think on average Latin American Spanish is spoken at the same speed as Spain?
Edit: And regardless of regional variations I am certain that there are Latin American regions which have a generally slower speed of speech than regions in Spain. So the thing that interests me is whether in that case the Spain Spanish has more pauses etc.
Faster in the Caribbean, slower in the Andes
Isn't the grammatically correct rendering of that line "she _has_ said goodbye too many times before"? (Present Perfect, right?)
Now I'm curious to hear the recording: is there a sibilant, "she's"?
Edit: Several others made the same point below. I'll leave this here, but they were first. /e
Even vocalizing normally the difference is hard to tell. Try saying "She said I love you" vs "She's said I love you" – unless you make a point to completely stop in between words there's basically zero distinction.
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.
Yeah, that sounds OK. Probably better than my original suggestion.
Or even the contracted "She's said goodbye too many times before".
Of course "Kiedyś żegnała się zbyt często" is more explicit and understandable, but not as efficient for this competition :)