How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin? (opens in new tab)

    "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 understand, but still make them sound Japanese. Somehow.

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.

Given this fact, one of the most amazing things to me is when a song can be translated relatively faithfully and while preserving the rhyme structure. It just blows my mind to listen to a song in another language with English subtitles and have it line up close enough to the English and still rhyming in their seperate tongue.

There are several translations of Harry Potter books to Russian language. Some translations keep names a is - Longbottom or Ravenclaw. While others translate them to Russian. There is (or rather was) so much love and hate about both options.

Ha, I've never really listened in to the rest of the words and kinda assumed the meaning was "she left many people" with "too many" indicating loneliness. TIL

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

Polish "za" has so many uses, it's really mind-boggling (as someone learning Polish)

Interesting, 'wiele' seems to be a distant cousin to the dutch 'veel' by way of 'viele' (German). More so because 'w' is pronounced as 'v'.

It can be used for both. A better translation for it would be "excessively".

Can't really speak for colloquial pt_BR, but wouldn't that be "demasiadas" instead of "muitas"?

I think you got that wrong, "valedixit" is just third person perfect, "he/she/it said goodbye", the verb suffix does not encode gender.

That is true. It could also be used by a "he", so there is a bit of ambiguity.

it is not encoded in the verb ending.

How very postmodern.

"often" and "too many times" do not have the same meaning at all

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....

Not parent but yes; related meanings (e.g. hate/torture, ask/know) and typically same part of speech (e.g. both verbs or both adjectives), and the lines having similar (but here reversed) sentence structure (another commenter posted the wiki link to Chiasmus which goes into more detail.

The structure we see here is x0 and y0, ...z0 / z1... y1 and x1.

Honestly they were just there in the Wikipedia text I copied. I've seen them in more modern texts to help with pronunciations and translation (if I recall correctly some words have different meanings depending on the length of the final vowel but that can normally be determined from context). Romans sometimes used the apex to denote long vowels which would have otherwise been ambiguous but I think it wasn't as commonplace as in textbooks today.

They’re length markers. There’s also the rarely used ˘ to show that a vowel be read short instead of long.

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.

6 years of Latin in school (only two years ago), at least officially a Latinum (German proof of knowing Latin) - and I don't understand a single sentence. Granted, I never had to learn understanding spoken language, but still.. Maybe it's time to reactivate what's left of my knowledge

Latin has a great introductory textbook called Lingua Latina per se illustrata by Hans Ørberg. I only got through the first book, so I'm no expert, but this is the one everybody recommends. And it's really neat: there is no English in the book at all, it's all Latin from page one, building up from really simple words and grammar in a logical way.

this is a great resource https://geoffreysteadman.com/

If you think Latin tattoos are bad, check out the kind of shit people get tattooed with in (what they think is) Chinese:

https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/

I'm not at all an expert on grammar, just know what sounds right to my ear. Can you more explicitly connect the 'had had' sentence to this example?

> "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.

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.

Somehow the context of the song hasn't been shared on the thread yet:

    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

Clearly "before" is needed to rhyme with "anymore". Also it is referencing the times she said "goodbye" before she said it this last time when she got on the plane.

It's pretty common to use present tenses in US English for events in the future or past. E.g. "I'm at the store the other day, and this guy comes up to me...", "I'm visiting the store later"

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.

Yep, for example, it's standard for US speakers to say "I wish you would have done X instead" whereas Brits would say that should be "I wish you had done X instead". I believe that that construction is a past subjunctive (since it's counterfactual) and therefore that the Brits are essentially right here ("had" is a past subjunctive form but "would have" is not; it's a conditional).

I don't know, as a speaker of American english to me it sounds wrong without "she'd."

"Did you already do it?" sounds perfectly normal to me on the other hand.

Since several people are not sure about this, I figured an easily skipped little grammar point can't hurt too much.

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)

No, that's past perfect but not passive. Passive voice is where the subject is not the actor. "Mistakes were made" is a classic example. Mistakes are the subject but did not do the verb. Someone made mistakes.

I honestly don't know but to me it sounds like present tense.

I'd be interested to know though. It just reads as ...wrong to me.

I guess it might be an English dialect thing.

Not sure, but the phrasing without 'd reads as off to me, a native english speaker.

Yes, I agree, Spanish is generally more verbose.

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?

So...?

X SCRIBE "SALVE MUNDE"

XX I X

> Elle salua excessivement avant

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 the version from Google Translate, "trop souvent" adds a notion of frequency like "too often" would, "avant" is shoehorned as a misplaced compulsory match for "before" when "too many times before" already felt like a ready-made phrase at this point.

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.

That doesn't really have the same meaning, and sounds very awkward though, especially because "saluer" needs an object.

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.

> Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent

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.

More like "Sie verabschiedete sich zu viele Male zuvor" (literally, "she farewelled too many times before", but acceptable to a native speaker).

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.

If you cheat a little you’d say “she said goodbye too many times” and leave before implied in English also. But then the song wouldn’t sound as good.

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

Does this not lack the 'before then' nuance ?

Si-a luat ramas bun deja adeseori.

that's more like "she's been saying goodbye too often"

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.

Oh no I was not talking about slangs, this can be like

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

Agreed; "she said goodbye too many times before" is grammatical. But it's temporally ambiguous. The sentence is reporting on a time in the past, a time when "her" utterances were even further in the past.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect

For what it's worth, I asked the same two questions to GPT 3.5 and got:

Yes, in Latin, you can say "multum vale" to mean "goodbye many times" or "vale nimis" to mean "goodbye too much"

Letter count is meaningless. You can change it by just changing the way you spell things, which was already arbitrary. (For example, there is a very real question of whether that final m in nimium is pronounced at all.)

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".

Couldn't you use "thus"?

If you translate it back into English, “she had said goodbye too much”, it’s clear that the real question is, “did the author mean something by those choices which the translation obliterated?”

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.

> 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.

Brevity isn’t the only goal with language; you also want robustness under noise and ease of random access (e.g. if you skim-read a text or if you enter a conversation a bit late or have to leave early)

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.”.

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 case system to indicate the epistemology of a statement, how the speaker knew that information (i.e. saw it first hand, heard it second hand, or saw evidence of it). Depending on the context, this may be vital or extraneous. Therefore the same statement that is "compressed" to remove useless information would be compressed two different ways. That doesn't seem feasible. All of this is to say, this sounds good in theory, but the complexities on practice are insurmountable.

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 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.

While some languages “compress” information into less syllables, sometimes redundancy can be a feature. For example I feel like languages like spanish have longer words, but since the intonation doesn’t vary too much, fluent speakers can speak way faster, or to put it more accurately, fast speech is more prevalent.

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.

I'm just a hobby linguist, but I believe research has generally shown that speech information density is relatively fixed. Languages with more complex syllabic structures end up speaking slower, but they can also code more information.

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

My first impulse - after playing some programming/optimization games over the morning - was: Is these just one kind of efficiency for a language?

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.

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

Yes, but it’s lossy compression, so beware.

Finally, my favourite pastime: natural language golfing!

Hackersnews don’t have to be programming or tech

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).

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...

I think what makes Latin so succinct are the 48 forms of a verb. And the 5 forms a of a noun just in singular form.

Yes it seems certain that classical Latin - and Greek - have come down to us in a written form that was fairly artificial; in Bodmer's wonderful phrasing, we can assume that "the crossword puzzles of Cicero" (ie the complex juggling about of words by relying on inflections) were eschewed in favour of a fixed word order when he was bawling out one of his slaves.

Few tackled the problem of AI with logic. Most used lots of electricity and computation hardware to analyze everything analytical, without actually doing any analysis.

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.

Usually German is just longer than a lot of other languages, more verbose.

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.

to dare → herausfordern

    Eng: "I dare you to drink that"  
    Deu: "Ich fordere dich heraus, das zu trinken."

Almost double

In the linked answer, there's a two-word full answer phrase:

> 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".

Are you sure? My understanding is that the two words are the full sentence.

Édit: I mean in the last paragraph of the answer.

it... did? Their final answer is:

> 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".

The top answer offers this 2 word solution: nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit

That's nothing, in Nuxalk, clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' means "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant".

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)

For further nitpicking: "etc." shall also end with '.' as it is the abbreviated form of "et cetera/caetera". Also, when used in an enumeration, it shall be preceded by a comma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_cetera

And sentences generally end with periods, or release from confinement.

It's "&c" – Latin ligatures are important, especially in a thread like this! ;-)

If we’re talking about clarity I think there’s some merit to the claim. It has tense markers that English lacks which buys you information in the conjugation about tense, gender and speaker. And unlike other Latin languages you aren’t able to drop the subject and just rely on the verb to convey it which forces clarity one could argue. You get the best of both worlds for clarity though the worst of both worlds for conjugation complexity and overall verboseness.

At least that’s my attempt to defend the GP’s statement.

English can do reasonably well if you don't mind poetic sounding language (and, to be fair, Shakespeare compressed down a lot of things into shorter, poetic idioms we use today). Something like her farewells overran, perhaps.

Not only that, I actually clicked to read the article!

Interestingly it's only one letter in the esolang Rewi: û