[HN Gopher] How would you say "She said goodbye too many times b...
___________________________________________________________________
How would you say "She said goodbye too many times before." in
Latin?
Author : micouay
Score : 356 points
Date : 2023-09-06 09:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (latin.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (latin.stackexchange.com)
| samjohnation111 wrote:
| [dead]
| VikingCoder wrote:
| How would you translate this into Latin?
|
| 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
|
| 20 GOTO 10
|
| ...
|
| X SCRIBE "SALVE MUNDI"
|
| XX ITE X
|
| or something like that?
| eindiran wrote:
| That reminds me of this:
| https://esolangs.org/wiki/Lingua_abstrusa
| schoen wrote:
| You might want the vocative of "world" (MUNDE) and the singular
| imperative of "go" (I). The latter is a bit easy to confuse
| with the Roman numeral for the number one, though!
| VikingCoder wrote:
| So...?
|
| X SCRIBE "SALVE MUNDE"
|
| XX I X
| neilkakkar wrote:
| I'm very confused, why is this so upvoted, someone mind
| explaining?
| mannykannot wrote:
| Aside from anything else, human language and its comprehension
| is an important aspect of AI, and the sheer variety among
| grammars is a salient feature that cannot be ignored.
| [deleted]
| baq wrote:
| People found this interesting.
|
| People upvoted.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Not only that, I actually clicked to read the article!
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I'm guessing other people found it intellectually stimulating.
| jukea wrote:
| I'm surprised myself, but I found it interesting to see how the
| sentence got compressed to only 2 words in Latin.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interestingly it's only one letter in the esolang Rewi: u
| barbarr wrote:
| It's the degree of compression that can be achieved, from 7
| words to 2.
| petercooper wrote:
| 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.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| The mystery of internet points is both fascinating and
| inscrutable.
| BoxFour wrote:
| It's a fascinating bit of information that demands minimal time
| to absorb and comprehend. It's a refreshing break from the
| usual content seen here while still being intellectually
| stimulating.
| talkingtab wrote:
| I am not sure why I upvoted this. Perhaps because I have dealt
| with C, C++, Java, JavaScript and some Python. I know a
| smattering of French, German, Dutch, Japanese and Czech. So
| perhaps that too. Or perhaps because of the Sapir-Whorf
| hypothesis.
| defrost wrote:
| It directly relates to the recent ETL (Extract - Transform -
| Load) thread patterns.
|
| 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_.
| bitdivision wrote:
| Mostly unrelated, but there was a study [0] some time ago which
| said that the information rate of all languages was roughly the
| same. So if a language had more data conveyed per syllable, then
| it might be spoken slower for instance.
|
| 0: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Spanish (Spain) is often spoken faster than English. And in my
| experience if you translate something from English to Spanish
| the text becomes 20%-30% longer.
| bitdivision wrote:
| 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?
| ihm wrote:
| There's huge variation in Latin American dialects, there's
| definitely no universal speed of speech.
| asveikau wrote:
| Not only that, but a lot of features of various forms of
| Latin American Spanish also occur in Spain, especially
| southern Spain which is the "root" of much of it.
| bitdivision wrote:
| There's definitely differences between countries and
| regions, and I don't have data for it, but the stereotype
| of Latin American Spanish being slower than Spain has by
| and large been true in my experience.
|
| 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.
| rigoleto wrote:
| > Do you think on average Latin American Spanish is
| spoken at the same speed as Spain?
|
| Faster in the Caribbean, slower in the Andes
| dmoy wrote:
| > always wondered if the information rate would actually be
| the same
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| [flagged]
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| If we're just trying to translate the literal meaning of this
| sentence from English to Latin, these are good answers. But I
| suspect that if we went back to ancient Rome and found someone
| experiencing the _meaning_ behind these words (a guy talking
| about a girl who has said goodbye too many time, and he doesn 't
| believe that it's going to be final this time either), the actual
| phrase he says may be completely different. Because while English
| speakers (specifically, American English speakers, or even more
| specifically wherever the songwriter is from, looks like it's Los
| Angeles) reach for this particular phrase to convey this meaning,
| this is very idiomatic when you think about it.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Her goodbye's a lie.
|
| She lies goodbye.
|
| Oft repeated, her exits depleted.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Eh... this is a really idiomatic expression in English. Maybe if
| you rummage Plautus or Terrence, perhaps even the epistolary
| corpus of Pliny or Cicero, you could chance upon something
| sentimentally accurate, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
| Grammatically accurate word for word reconstructions aren't
| really going to convey it.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Idiomatic enough that I, as a native speaker, didn't understand
| what was intended by the phrase outside of context.
| fillipvt wrote:
| In Spanish this would look like "dijo adios demasiado". Although
| unsure how to fit the "before" without being too literal.
| JTbane wrote:
| Maroon V?
| nickspacek wrote:
| The ability to express thoughts more concisely in various
| languages is kind of sort of a plot point in the science fiction
| novel Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, published in 1966. Picked up
| a few of his novels to read and I've been enjoying them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
| dTal wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ChrisRR wrote:
| 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 valedixit": He got too sick
|
| "totiens valedixit": He was always well
|
| Edit: Playing around with google translate, "nim valedixit"
| translates to He said goodbye. But "valedixit" 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!
| messe wrote:
| 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):
|
| totiens valedixit: She said goodbye so many times.
|
| nimium valedixit: She said goodbye too much
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/6d564b0a-c613-4411-a656-735cd9.
| ..
| hoseja wrote:
| The subject is encoded in the verb, as stated.
| messe wrote:
| The number (singular) and person (3rd) are conjugated for
| in Latin, but not the gender (feminine).
| mort96 wrote:
| That seems like a google translate issue, the word "valedico"
| seems to unambiguously mean bidding farewell (or giving a
| farewell speech):
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedico#Latin, and valedixit
| is unambiguously the "third-person singular perfect active
| indicative" of valedico
| (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedixit).
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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.
| wink wrote:
| Only with context! As is seen in one comment, the pronoun is
| left out and just the 2 words would only say "[third person]
| did something". My Latin lessons were very long ago, but yeah.
| You'd probably declare it once per paragraph, then shorten. But
| in isolation this information is lost.
| raverbashing wrote:
| So it seems this is why "classical Latin" died out and "vulgar
| Latin" became the romance languages of today
|
| 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
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| 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.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| "she farewelled excessively"
| pavlov wrote:
| The same translation logic works in Finnish: "liikaa hyvasteli"
| is the equivalent of the Latin "nimium valedixit".
|
| 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.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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.
| irrational wrote:
| There is a word used frequently in the Hebrew Bible that is
| four letters long vyhy 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 "Chang ", 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...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Couldn't you use "thus"?
| irrational wrote:
| I don't think so. The first letter means "and" and the rest
| is the verb "to be". In this case, the verb is in the Qal
| Sequential imperfect 3rd Person Masculine Singular form.
| Thus doesn't have the same connotation.
|
| 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
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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".
| irrational wrote:
| > There is no indication anywhere in the song, as far as I
| can see, of what "before" refers to.
|
| 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".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Yes, English is my native language. USA, California and
| New Mexico. For what it's worth, I qualified for SET by
| scoring 710 on the SAT verbal section at age 12.
|
| > 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).
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| You are reading way too much into this. It's just a pop
| song. This isn't high literature. "Before now" makes the
| most sense to me, but, like poetry, you interpret it
| however you want. There is no right answer.
| ragazzina wrote:
| I am not a native speaker, but doesn't "before" just mean
| "in the past" here? It sounds clear to me: the girl has
| previously tried to break up many times, so now he is
| breaking up with her.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I am not a native speaker, but doesn't "before" just
| mean "in the past" here?
|
| 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.)
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I don't think it's that complex. The implication seems to
| be that they have broken up/argued so many times before,
| and this time they're breaking up for good
|
| 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
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > And the first line is past tense, just like the second.
|
| 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.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| She said goodbye too many times before doesn't seem
| confusing to me.
|
| 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.
| dghf wrote:
| > it can't be considered fluent English when seen as an
| isolated sentence
|
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It is indeed quite common for poetry to violate the
| normal rules of the language. But that takes one of two
| forms: archaism, or a flaw in the poetry. (It's also
| common for poetry to violate the rules that govern the
| poetry itself. Composing poetry is very difficult!)
| Compare the opening of Mark Chesnutt's _She Was_ :
|
| _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.
| orangepurple wrote:
| The Polish language also has an insane amount of compression.
| Example, "to play":
| https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bcthjo/conjugation_o...
| alcover wrote:
| 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.
| jdmichal wrote:
| 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...
| enkid wrote:
| 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.
| alcover wrote:
| > single syllable in some languages but requires a lot of
| context or explanation in other languages
|
| 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).
| pjc50 wrote:
| Different languages "compress" different things depending
| on what was needed. The Qin emperor did not know of
| limited liability companies, due to the concept being
| invented several hundred years later in Europe, so
| Chinese writes "You Xian Ze Ren Gong Si " where an
| English speaker would write "ltd."
|
| 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.
| enkid wrote:
| "The cat" has different information in it than "kot."
| That same sentence also translates to "A cat is on the
| table," but no English speaker would say "the cat" and "a
| cat" have the same meaning. In fact, I can't think of a
| context where both sentences would be interchangeable.
| The listener either already knows which cat is "the cat"
| or would be confused. "A cat" implies an unknown cat. If
| you walk into your house and say "a cat is on the table,"
| the assumption is its an unknown cat. If you say "the
| cat" it's most likely a pet. In some contexts that
| matters and some it doesn't, therefore you can't just say
| Polish compresses better.
| mbg721 wrote:
| "The cat" is folksy/chummy in a similar way to "the
| wife".
| dlainhart wrote:
| From a data compression/language efficiency standpoint,
| both sentences in both languages actually rely on a
| (potentially large) amount of unstated context to sort
| out these ambiguities. In some languages, this context
| can be totally unspoken and merely known to both the
| speaker and the listener. This absolutely MUST be
| accounted for if a truly correct translation is to be
| made.
|
| 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.
| mbg721 wrote:
| While that's true, anyone with a cat can tell you that
| their house instantly becomes a farmhouse, and they age
| years at a time on the spot as a result of said feline.
| The context is kind of a given.
| 93po wrote:
| > the complexities on practice are insurmountable.
|
| "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" begs to differ
| notpushkin wrote:
| Finally, my favourite pastime: natural language golfing!
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Hackersnews don't have to be programming or tech
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Lossy compression though. The songs meaning was lost because
| "too many times" is very important to make sense of the
| lyrics that follows.
| JoBrad wrote:
| Yes, but it's lossy compression, so beware.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _I wonder how one could measure a language efficiency._
|
| An area of active research:
|
| * https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/c
| o...
|
| * 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/wh
| at_is_...
|
| Doing a search for "language information entropy" also gives
| back a number of results.
| seer wrote:
| 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.
| canistel wrote:
| Since you mentioned Malayalam, the sentence can be made
| into a single word in the language -
| _vitacholliyirunnereyaval_ (vittcolliyirunneerreyv[?]).
| Sounds lyrical, but does it.
|
| No magic but plain agglutination, and I am sure this should
| be possible in languages like Finnish too...
| tetha wrote:
| 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.
| chewxy wrote:
| 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.
| shanusmagnus wrote:
| You can't store "the semantics" losslessly because you
| can't definitively say what the semantics of an utterance
| even are, unless you're using some reduced definition of
| the term, or a pre-selected frame, or a computer language.
| jdmichal wrote:
| > 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...
| tsukikage wrote:
| 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.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _" 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._
|
| 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"
| klodolph wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's hard enough to translate when there's one meaning -
| but good writers often use multiple meaning of the same
| words - either for deeper meaning or for humor or other
| layered meanings.
|
| That's why the translations of Asterix are so impressive.
| mbg721 wrote:
| The Spanish dubs of the Simpsons have a similarly good
| reputation.
| scarmig wrote:
| > Translation is a process which both erases information
| and introduces new information.
|
| 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."
| ekidd wrote:
| > _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?"_
|
| 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_.
| js2 wrote:
| For example, the closing dialogue of the French movie _A
| bout de souffle_ ( "Out of breath" but given the English
| title _Breathless_ ) is difficult to translate to English
| because of the ambiguous use of "degueulasse".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathless_(1960_film)#Closin
| g...
| [deleted]
| magnat wrote:
| > Translation is a process which both erases information
| and introduces new information
|
| "Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not
| faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not
| beautiful."
| saalweachter wrote:
| Digging into "She said goodbye too many times before"
| versus "She said goodbye too many times", the "before" in
| the first implies that She is saying goodbye _now_.
|
| I'm not sure if the Latin translation as it is captures
| that, or if you'd go for something more like "valedixisse
| nimium valedixit", "she said goodbye having said goodbye
| too much"; I kind of like that because then you're saying
| goodbye twice in the same line.
| alcover wrote:
| > She is saying goodbye now.
|
| Exactly (or _at the time_ ). Many submissions here attain
| shortness by eliding this important precision.
| Someone wrote:
| 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.".
| [deleted]
| esotericimpl wrote:
| [dead]
| smaddox wrote:
| Roughly the same number of syllables, though.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| The two-word phrase that was offered in the answer (nimium
| saepe) was actually not a full answer, it was only for "too
| many times". The answer actually did not, well.. answer the
| actual question.
| roblabla wrote:
| it... did? Their final answer is:
|
| > nimium valedixit or totiens valedixit: "she bade farewell
| too much before" or "she bade farewell so many times before".
|
| nimium/totiens conveying "too many times before" and
| "valedixit" conveying "she said goodbye".
| ace32229 wrote:
| The top answer offers this 2 word solution: nimium valedixit
| or totiens valedixit
| kangalioo wrote:
| In the linked answer, there's a two-word full answer phrase:
|
| > So I would cut this down to something like nimium valedixit
| or totiens valedixit: "she bade farewell too much before" or
| "she bade farewell so many times before".
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Are you sure? My understanding is that the two words are the
| full sentence.
|
| Edit: I mean in the last paragraph of the answer.
| nicbou wrote:
| German has many of those moments. It's a brilliant language for
| very specific uses, like user manuals.
| tetris11 wrote:
| to dare - herausfordern Eng: "I dare you to
| drink that" Deu: "Ich fordere dich heraus, das zu
| trinken."
|
| Almost double
| yorwba wrote:
| Trink's, wenn du dich traust! (Drink it if you dare.)
| carstenhag wrote:
| "Trink's doch!" has pretty much the same meaning, in the
| correct context. "Just drink it [... if you dare]"
| zoky wrote:
| Not fair getting "doch" involved, that's like saying
| "dude": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d7sf2O90eu4
| r0b1n wrote:
| Just because all the other languages are inferior for the
| lack of a "doch" equivalent... ;)
| mbg721 wrote:
| That's the verbal equivalent of the Indian head-tilt,
| right?
| r0b1n wrote:
| Schon, aber doch mit anderer Bedeutung.
|
| And we have more of those, like "schon", "gell", "fei"
| (in some dialects), "halt", "eben". Maybe a few more I
| cannot think of right now.
| ginko wrote:
| Deu: "Ex!"
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ex#German
| r0b1n wrote:
| If you want to keep it very formal. Informally one would
| say something like "Trau dich, trinks!", or even shorter,
| "Komm, trinks!" or "Hopp, trinks!". Also depends on the
| exact intentions, if it were a bet, one could translate it
| as "Wetten dass dus nicht trinkst?", which would also state
| which side of the bet the speaker is on. "Herausfordern" is
| also more something like "challenge", as in "one knight
| challenging the other", less like "dare" as in "one child
| trying to get the other to do something".
| h4ckerle wrote:
| Shortest translation that comes to my mind would be: "Ich
| fordre dich zum Trunk." Which IMO translates the original
| sentence pretty well. You could add a "heraus" at the end
| but as a native I would not say that it is necessary. Also
| the Word "Trunk" sounds a bit antiquated but Duden still
| lists it, therefore I'd say it's fair game.
| andix wrote:
| 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.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| There is a mood useful especially in certain types of
| fiction for which German is a perfect fit. Because the most
| important verb in a sentence tend to be at the very end in
| German, it naturally creates a sense of suspense.
| alcover wrote:
| syllable count english 10 - She said
| goodbye too many times before latin 6 - nimium
| valedixit polish 7 - Zbyt czesto sie zegnala
| 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 has 'before', which is lacking in some
| submissions.
| [deleted]
| umanwizard wrote:
| I don't think it's meaningful to compare syllables, since not
| all languages take the same amount of time to say a given
| number of syllables. English for example is an stress-timed
| language, not a syllable-timed one, so the number of unstressed
| syllables is basically irrelevant.
| tail_exchange wrote:
| You can reduce "demasiadamente" to just "demais". I realized
| later that I was being silly. That would be 7 syllables.
| dejj wrote:
| Literal Code Golf.
| oneshtein wrote:
| In Ukrainian: 9 - <<proshchavalasia zabagato>>
| oblio wrote:
| Romanian:
|
| 11
|
| Ea si-a luat adio de prea multe ori (inainte = before,
| optional).
|
| 9
|
| Ea si-a luat adio excesiv.
|
| 8
|
| Ea si-a luat adio prea mult.
| vladb38b wrote:
| Si-a luat ramas bun deja adeseori.
| niyaven wrote:
| I mean technically I would translate "nimium valedixit" into
| "elle faisait trop d'adieux", which is also 6 syllables (with
| the advantage to keep the she). If you want to keep before,
| which is skipped in this latin transaction, then it would be 2
| extra syllables.
| r0b1n wrote:
| If you cheat a little, you can get to similarly low numbers in
| German:
|
| "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.
| bitcurious wrote:
| 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.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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.
| self_awareness wrote:
| polish 7 (8) - Zbyt czesto sie (juz) zegnala
|
| Although it's possible to drop "sie" 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 czesto juz zegnala
| sznio wrote:
| 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.
| "Kiedys zegnala sie zbyt czesto"? "Czesto" also kinda applies
| to frequency in time, not count, so a literal "zbyt wiele
| razy" feels better.
| self_awareness wrote:
| I feel like "she'd been saying goodbye too often" is "zbyt
| czesto zegnala", but adding "zbyt czesto juz zegnala" is
| like "she'd been saying goodbye too often, but now she's
| fed up with saying goodbyes, and doesn't do that anymore".
|
| Of course "Kiedys zegnala sie zbyt czesto" is more explicit
| and understandable, but not as efficient for this
| competition :)
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| It doesn't really capture the intent of the original
| sentence either. To convey the same idea you'd have to
| say something like "Za wiele razy mowila zegnam"
| self_awareness wrote:
| "Say goodbye" doesn't necessarily mean "to speak the
| words 'goodbye'". I'm not an English expert, but I think
| that waving with your hand is also "saying goodbye". And
| if that's true, then "zegnac" is the same as "saying
| goodbye".
| ajuc wrote:
| "Czesto" sounds way more natural here than "zbyt wiele
| razy". Nobody says "zbyt wiele razy" :)
| hashar wrote:
| There is surely multiple alternatives for any given language,
| similar to Draconis compressing the latin form, in french
| instead of the literal: 11 - Elle a dit au
| revoir trop souvent avant
|
| You could replace: * "dire au revoir" by "saluer" (which used
| both for greeting and farewell so you get a bit of data
| information lost) * "trop souvent" which uses the "trop"
| adverbe when there is a word for it: "excessivement"
|
| 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.
| seszett wrote:
| 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 quitte_ 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, " _deja_ trop " or "trop
| _souvent_ " would make these sentences much more natural.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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.
| nicolaslegland wrote:
| 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.
| alcover wrote:
| > "Elle a tant de fois dit au revoir"
|
| Nice! And sounds better.
|
| To be nitpicking, I'd propose _" Elle a tant dit au revoir
| avant"_ (9 also), which retains the original 'before'.
| ajuc wrote:
| I'd skip "sie" and reverse the word order. "Zegnala za czesto"
| sounds better and more poetic ;)
|
| If you want to include "before" (which Lating skipped):
| "Zegnala juz za czesto"
| erremerre wrote:
| Spanish:
|
| Despidiose excesivamente. 10
| jiofj wrote:
| That's too lossy, and "despidiose" is trying too hard.
| flobosg wrote:
| > is trying too hard
|
| Maybe, but still a valid pronominal verb.
| alcover wrote:
| Does this not lack the ' _before then_ ' nuance ?
| flobosg wrote:
| "Despidiose excesivamente _antes_ "?
| GonzaloQuero wrote:
| It doesn't. "Despidio" is already past tense. That said,
| "despidiose", while valid, is quite archaic. If it was me,
| I'd say "se despidio demasiado" or even "se despidio de
| mas"
|
| Edit: Reading the meaning of the song, I'd say "dijo adios
| demasiadas veces", as it stays closer to the original
| meaning.
| grokkedit wrote:
| 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 gia detto addio troppe volte` instead
| marcodiego wrote:
| The most natural translation in modern Portuguese is "Ela disse
| adeus vezes demais antes."
| [deleted]
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| However, English will usually come out at or near the top in
| terms of "syllable efficiency" due to its high incidence of
| common monosyllabic words, and the feature that inflectional
| suffixes will often not add a syllable (e.g. dog-s, love-d).
| academia_hack wrote:
| 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:
|
| "Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
|
| Nescio, sed fieri sentio 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.
| ana_winters wrote:
| There's a reason Latin is a dead language. You'd do well to
| remember that.
| leephillips wrote:
| What an amazing comment. Thank you so much for taking the time
| to write this.
| sharikous wrote:
| The more elaborate books of the Bible, like Isaiah/Yeshayahu
| and Psalms/Tehillim, make use of this kind of structure a lot
| in the original. You can easily find "triple chiasms" with
| structure ABCCBA. I don't know why this isn't emphasised
| usually.
|
| 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
| bshimmin wrote:
| Great comment! For anyone looking to learn a bit more about
| this, the "crossing" technique described above is called
| "chiasmus": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus
|
| Another famous example is "Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus"
| from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this
| poem, in fact).
| haste410 wrote:
| > Each verb on the first line has a "mate" on the second.
|
| Can you clarify what a "mate" is? What determines a word's
| "mate"? The position on the line? Their meaning?
| viciousvoxel wrote:
| 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.
| academia_hack wrote:
| Exactly this! It gets even cooler in this example too
| because the meter for "Odi et amo" elided to "Od'et amo"
| directly parallels the scansion for "excrucior" (long
| syllable, short syllable, short syllable, long syllable).
| So the two concepts that start and end the poem (love+hate,
| and torture) are also linked by how they are pronounced.
| Incidentally, that linkage is also the message of the poem
| itself.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| throwaway_69_69 wrote:
| [flagged]
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| There was vert little pretence in the message above.
| exitb wrote:
| Is that a way an actual native speaker would phrase it, or is it
| just Latin golf that would sound out of place?
| hgsgm wrote:
| That's what the question is trying to figure out
|
| Actual native speakers are all dead. It's poetry, not
| conversational. The answers looked to poets.
| monster_group wrote:
| While I don't know Latin, I do know Sanskrit. In Sanskrit you can
| say entire sentences with one word. For example "jigmissaami / "
| is a full sentence and it means "I want to go." This is possible
| because Sanskrit (and Latin) are highly inflected languages. The
| price for brevity is that now you have to remember many more
| forms of verbs and nouns. So nothing impressive (at least to me).
| screamingninja wrote:
| I find it highly impressive, but that's just me.
| xdennis wrote:
| 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
| [xlp'khwltklpkl:skwkts'] (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/
| x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C... ).
|
| It's formed from: xl- ("have") + pxwlt ("bunchberry") + -lp
| ("plant") + -ll (pluperfect marker) + -s (possessive marker)
| + kwc (of uncertain function)
| [deleted]
| nihiven wrote:
| I read the linked info and the comments asking why this was
| upvoted and it's a good question. The liked answer feels a lot
| like a text version of a TikTok video. It's an interesting fact
| that takes very little time to read and makes us feel that we've
| learned something about a interesting topic outside of our
| expertise. A TikTok example is a video about a 'little known'
| fact of quantum mechanics. The linked info gives us the same type
| of satisfaction we would get from a TikTok, but is on Hacker News
| because it's presented in a more 'legitimate' way.
| [deleted]
| tonetheman wrote:
| It pleases me greatly that there is a latin stackexchange.
| [deleted]
| da39a3ee wrote:
| The English starting point is very questionable. Is it trying to
| say "she had said goodbye too many times before"? In any case,
| this makes the exercise of translating questionable.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Would Latin GPT come up with that 2 word phrase?
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| GPT4 response: You can translate the phrase
| "She said goodbye too many times before" into Latin as "Dixit
| vale saepe nimis antea".
|
| I asked GPT4 whether it could make the translation shorter to
| which it responded that Latin was inherently a verbose
| language, so no.
| z2 wrote:
| 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"_
| penguin_booze wrote:
| For a change of scenery, here's your Latin 101:
| https://youtu.be/0lczHvB3Y9s.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| mbg721 wrote:
| A side effect of that cramming is that word order doesn't
| affect meaning as much as in e.g. English, which makes poetry
| and wordplay different.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > french remains the more exacting and clear language for
| communicating specific ideas.
|
| /r/badlinguistics nonsense.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Reducing word count is rather useless if you end up with words
| that are much longer.
|
| 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. "valedixit" is just "vale" and "dixit" smashed
| together into a single verb.
|
| The proposed "illa nimium valedixit" (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.
| [deleted]
| lgeorget wrote:
| [citation needed]?!
| OtomotO wrote:
| Nitpick: it's etc for et cetera
| masswerk wrote:
| It's "&c" - Latin ligatures are important, especially in a
| thread like this! ;-)
| r0b1n wrote:
| ...
| vgalin wrote:
| 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
| sandworm101 wrote:
| And sentences generally end with periods, or release from
| confinement.
| stinos wrote:
| One could also say that French is 'rather different', not
| better or more clear. Let alone superior (though I do not know
| where that claim came from).
| anbende wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| whimsicalism wrote:
| As a native english speaker, I feel like "She'd said goodbye too
| many times before" better conveys the meaning for me.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| Sure, but then it's no longer the lyrics to a Maroon 5 song.
| [deleted]
| ak_111 wrote:
| I think two words also in arabic : wd`tn tkrr
| misja111 wrote:
| [flagged]
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Meh, ChatGPTs answer might be very different if it would have
| been trained on this stackexchange thread.
| efficax wrote:
| chatgpt is no cicero
| tgv wrote:
| Illa doesn't even mean "she", and I see no other use for it
| in the translation. But my Latin is very rusty.
| masswerk wrote:
| Mine shows some serious oxidation, too, but, if I'd go with
| this, at all, I'd prefer, _" saepe valere dixit illa antea
| nimis"_
|
| (I guess, "saepe" is really a bit luxurious here, while I
| can see the need for expressing, even emphasizing the
| gender related aspect.)
| tuomosipola wrote:
| Illa means "she". (Thesaurus linguae Latinae 7,1:349)
| uptownfunk wrote:
| [delayed]
| tail_exchange wrote:
| 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).
| ajuc wrote:
| Slavic too. In Polish: zegnala (she said goodbye) za czesto
| (literally too often, but used here it would convey the meaning
| and sound more natural than literal za wiele razy).
|
| BTW zegnala encodes the gender. If it was he it would be
| zegnal. So arguably it's more compressed than latin.
|
| BTW2 the real compression happens in conditionals zegnalaby =
| she would have said goodbye
| Metacelsus wrote:
| Polish "za" has so many uses, it's really mind-boggling (as
| someone learning Polish)
| bitdivision wrote:
| Yes, I think similarly in Spanish would be `se despidio
| demasiado` or `se despidio 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?
| tail_exchange wrote:
| It can be used for both. A better translation for it would be
| "excessively".
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| You can do the same thing in English.
|
| She said bye often.
|
| 5 syllables.
| elliottkember wrote:
| "often" and "too many times" do not have the same meaning at
| all
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Neither do the majority of the translations.
|
| 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.
| tail_exchange wrote:
| That's not true. What you provided completely changes the
| meaning, whereas the translation I provided only loses
| one detail (the speaker's genre) without altering the
| meaning.
|
| 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.
| lopis wrote:
| You lost the gender of the person though, which from my
| understanding is preserved in Latin with a verb suffix.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| it is not encoded in the verb ending.
| hgsgm wrote:
| How very postmodern.
| vlz wrote:
| I think you got that wrong, "valedixit" is just third person
| perfect, "he/she/it said goodbye", the verb suffix does not
| encode gender.
| tail_exchange wrote:
| That is true. It could also be used by a "he", so there is a
| bit of ambiguity.
| trgn wrote:
| I'm really curious, where is the gendered information in
| "valedixit"? I feel like the proposed translation misses
| that romantic weight by keeping the gender ambiguous. What
| am I missing?
| tail_exchange wrote:
| I don't speak Latin, but according to my short research
| (aka googling), it does not distinguish between third-
| person masculine and feminine. So the ambiguity is also
| present in Latin.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| The thing missing is the context in which the sentence is
| used.
|
| 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."
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| My shot >> Illa dixit vale multis temporibus
|
| (*) 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]'
| Zecc wrote:
| Can't really speak for colloquial pt_BR, but wouldn't that be
| "demasiadas" instead of "muitas"?
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| >but wouldn't that be "demasiadas" instead of "muitas"?
|
| I could be, but it wouldn't sound natural in pt_BR
| colloquial mode.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| Edit: but I get the discussion is centered on 'too many'.
|
| '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.
| maleldil wrote:
| "muitas" is "many", "demasiadas" would be "too many".
| "demasiadas" works better in the context here, but I
| (Brazillian) don't think I've ever heard it spoken, only
| read.
| Lio wrote:
| 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 where someone's left out a closing tag. :P
| bloak wrote:
| > 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".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 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.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| 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).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > 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".
|
| 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"
| jgwil2 wrote:
| This is not standard or correct in American English either,
| though interestingly, German uses the same form for both
| situations ("ich wunsche, du hattest es getan" vs "du
| hattest es getan, wenn..."), so if that construction is
| more common in American English it's possible that it's due
| in part to the influence of German speakers.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| That's interesting. While perhaps not "standard", I'd
| definitely say it is very common among educated US
| speakers. Not to blame Bruce Springsteen -- who for all I
| know might have been trying to depict via grammatical
| error a certain sort of person in his song -- but for me
| it always brings to mind the song Bobby Jean. But now I
| see that apparently that is "wished" not "wish" so it's
| extra confusing :) 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"
| singron wrote:
| 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.
| prosody wrote:
| The answerer does say that either the perfect past (Latin's
| closest to -ed) or the pluperfect past (Latin's closest to had
| -ed) would work, they just chose perfect past. Maybe that
| choice was because the perfect past has a sense of finality
| that English's simple past doesn't, so it isn't necessary to
| reach deeper into the sequence of tenses as it is in English.
| [deleted]
| benrutter wrote:
| If you're interested in the grammar, I think the distinction
| you're getting at is pluperfect (plan action that was
| completed-in-the-past-in-the-past) and perfect (an action that
| was completed-in-the-past).
|
| "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.
| jakear wrote:
| 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.
| eszed wrote:
| Thanks for the context, as I'm not familiar with that song.
|
| 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
| jakear wrote:
| There's no audible difference between signing "she's
| said" and "she said", the s's blend together. Any
| possible difference would be entirely obscured by
| stylistic choices.
|
| 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.
| Majromax wrote:
| > "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.
| hgsgm wrote:
| I don't think that matches. In your version, "before"
| implies that something happened that affected the goodbye-
| saying.
|
| 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.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Doesn't adding the 'd change it from past tense to passive
| voice past tense?
| Lio wrote:
| 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.
| slhck wrote:
| 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.
| Lio wrote:
| > "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".
| jameshart wrote:
| I always heard the lyric as 'she's said goodbye..', which
| both scans and makes more grammatical sense. Also matches
| the tense of the previous line - 'this love has taken its
| toll..'
| thfuran wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Not sure, but the phrasing without 'd reads as _off_ to me, a
| native english speaker.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| How am I the first person here to uselessly link to the Latin
| Lesson scene from the Life of Brian?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjOfQfxmTLQ
| prerok wrote:
| I was learning Latin at the time I watched that movie. Fell off
| the sofa, laughing, during that scene :)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The original English is ungrammatical, or at least incomplete; it
| helps a bit if you start from grammatical English.
|
| So first alter it to "She HAD said goodbye too many times
| before". Then it's essier to translate correctly.
| wunderland wrote:
| Both "she said goodbye too many times before" and "she had said
| goodbye too many times before" are grammatically correct
| English. They have slightly different meanings.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| 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
| burkaman wrote:
| That would be the past perfect tense, a different tense with a
| different meaning that is only used in the context of another
| past event you're talking about. The original quote is simple
| past tense and is correct.
|
| 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.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I wonder if the original question -asking if a popular song lyric
| could be translated into Latin - was asked because someone wants
| a tattoo of it.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| justinator wrote:
| Let's hope not- Maroon 5's songwriting is not known to be...
| good.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| People trusting the advice of a stranger over email to
| permanently etch their skin? What a world...
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| That was my first thought as well. Ah, to be young again!
| tuomosipola wrote:
| When I was the president of the society of Latin students, I
| got several emails asking for tattoo translations. I hope I got
| them right.
| leke wrote:
| My favourite part was - Saves valuable chisel time.
| bertil wrote:
| A clear reference to 'lapidarius/um', an explicit quality of
| speakers, and meaning literally that.
| DeTheBug wrote:
| You can do something similar with Arabic, I can think of few ways
| to squeeze it into 4~2 words phrase (variations) without
| sacrificing clarity
| ClaraForm wrote:
| [dead]
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