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

by micouay on 9/6/23, 9:57 AM with 302 comments

by phendrenad2 on 9/6/23, 7:18 PM
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.
by teleforce on 9/6/23, 8:29 PM
Fun facts, Grammar schools in the UK were originally schools created mainly to teach Latin grammar and currently there are 163 Grammar schools operating in the UK as academic oriented (or orientated per UK English grammar), secondary schools [1],[2]. You know that the language is hard when you have multitude of schools dedicated to teach its grammar. Latin has a reputation of a complex language with complicated grammar, and the OP kind of demonstrating this perception.
Interestingly, based on School Standards and Framework Act 1998, no new maintained grammar schools can be opened [3].
[1] Grammar school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school
[2] List of grammar schools in England:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
[3] Grammar School Statistics:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
by tail_exchange on 9/6/23, 12:01 PM
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).
by nickspacek on 9/6/23, 1:00 PM
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
by VikingCoder on 9/6/23, 4:29 PM
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
by academia_hack on 9/6/23, 12:39 PM
I'm really sad at how much Latin I've managed to lose since my school days. It's really an incredible language and this stack exchange post shows some of that versatility.
Because the words in Latin contain dense grammatical information in their spelling, you can be much more flexible with word order.
This gives classical poets the ability to do crazy things with word ordering to create "word pictures" where the structuring ordering of the words conveys some additional meaning. This can be done in English too, but classical Latin is almost made for it.
For example, Catulus 85:
"Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris.
Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior."
The translation Wikipedia gives is: "I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.
I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured."
But there is so much brilliance in the structure of the poem that translation cannot really encapsulate. The last word "excrucior" (I am crucified) references a relationship between the structure of the first and second line. Each verb on the first line has a "mate" on the second. For example: odi (I hate)<->excrucior (I am tortured), requires (you ask) <-> nescio (I know). If you draw lines connecting these mates to each other, they form a number of crosses - referencing the "crux" in "excrucior". The poem literally depicts the torture instrument that is Catulus' love.
Even more remarkably, this poem follows a strict metrical standard dictating the order of long and short syllables: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegiac_couplet and it achieves this meter in part due to the use of elision in the opening of the poem, where two vowel sounds get merged due to the ordering of words. "Odi et Amo" is read as "Odet Amo" as the the love and hate crush together and evoke that sense of pressure and torment that underlies the couplet.
Classical Latin had so much capacity for structural complexity that is really remarkable. It's not just that you can say more stuff with less words, but that the allocation of information in the grammar allows for entirely different expressions than you could make if word order dictated meaning.
by jackcosgrove on 9/6/23, 1:14 PM
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.
by whimsicalism on 9/6/23, 7:43 PM
As a native english speaker, I feel like "She'd said goodbye too many times before" better conveys the meaning for me.
by Lio on 9/6/23, 12:02 PM
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
by bitdivision on 9/6/23, 12:33 PM
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

by jll29 on 9/6/23, 11:57 PM

Now "totiēns valedīxit" is quite a bit shorter than the English original.

I was hoping our friends on StackExchange could have found a Latin equivalent that fits the number of syllables of the English version, or it won't help if the original translation request was motivated by an upcoming Latin karaoke... not that machine translation was any better.

Dixit Google Translatum:

  Tam altus eram, non agnovi
  Ignis ardens in oculis eius
  Chaos gubernans mentem meam
  Vale quod illa surrexit in planum susurrabant
  Numquam iterum redi, sed semper in corde meo, heu
  Hic amor accepit portorium in me
  Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
  Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
  Et non optio
  'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
  Whoa?
  Whoa?
  Whoa?
  Conatus sum optimum appetitum pascere
  Serva eam omni nocte venire
  Tam difficile est ut ei satisfiat, oh
  Tenentur ludens amore sicut erat sicut ludus
  Simulans idem
  Deinde conversus et iterum discede, sed uh-oh
  Hic amor accepit portorium in me
  Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
  Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
  Et non optio
  'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
  Whoa?
  Whoa?
  Whoa?
  Fracta haec figam, alis fractis reparabo tuis
  Et fac omnia recte (saxum est, ita bene)
  Premuntur coxis tuis, ego digitos deprimo
  Omnis inch ex vobis
  Quia scio quod vis ut faciam
  Hic amor accepit portorium in me
  Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
  Her breakin cor 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
  Et non optio
  'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'
  Hic amor accepit portorium in me
  Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
  Et cor meum est breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
  Et illa etiam pluries ante vale dixit
  Hic amor accepit portorium in me
  Dixit etiam multis temporibus ante vale
  Et cor eius breakin 'in conspectu oculorum meorum
  Et non optio
  'Fac tibi non vale ultra dicere'

EDIT: this automatic translation has so many errors, my late Latin teacher must just have turned in his grave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPpTgCho5ZA

by VikingCoder on 9/6/23, 4:34 PM
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?
by penguin_booze on 9/6/23, 2:04 PM
For a change of scenery, here's your Latin 101: https://youtu.be/0lczHvB3Y9s.
by lr4444lr on 9/6/23, 7:18 PM
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.

by alcover on 9/6/23, 12:18 PM

syllable count

  english
  10 - She said goodbye too many times before
  
  latin
  6 - nimium valedīxit
  
  polish
  7 - Zbyt często się żegnała

  german
  10 - Sie hat sich schon zu oft verabschiedet
  
  french
  11 - Elle a dit au revoir trop souvent avant
  
  italian
  12 - Ha detto addio troppe volte prima
  
  portuguese
  11 - despedira-se demasiadamente  (user tail_exchange)
  14 - Ela despediu-se demasiadas vezes antes  (deepl)

nb: the target sentence has 'before', which is lacking in some submissions.

by DeTheBug on 9/6/23, 12:08 PM
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
by exitb on 9/6/23, 1:43 PM
Is that a way an actual native speaker would phrase it, or is it just Latin golf that would sound out of place?
by leke on 9/6/23, 1:36 PM
My favourite part was - Saves valuable chisel time.
by da39a3ee on 9/6/23, 1:27 PM
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.
by fillipvt on 9/6/23, 2:49 PM
In Spanish this would look like "dijo adiós demasiado". Although unsure how to fit the "before" without being too literal.
by JTbane on 9/6/23, 1:20 PM
Maroon V?
by pizzafeelsright on 9/6/23, 12:11 PM
Her goodbye's a lie.
She lies goodbye.
Oft repeated, her exits depleted.
by uptownfunk on 9/6/23, 8:00 PM
Imagine if we had this much attention paid to other Classical languages.
by denton-scratch on 9/6/23, 1:13 PM
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.
by ak_111 on 9/6/23, 1:10 PM
I think two words also in arabic : ودعتنا تكرار
by FrustratedMonky on 9/6/23, 11:55 AM
Would Latin GPT come up with that 2 word phrase?
by jrflowers on 9/6/23, 9:00 PM
“Maroon 5” delenda est
by dTal on 9/6/23, 11:44 AM
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.
by monster_group on 9/6/23, 12:20 PM
While I don't know Latin, I do know Sanskrit. In Sanskrit you can say entire sentences with one word. For example "जिगमिषामि।" 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).
by nihiven on 9/6/23, 12:20 PM
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.
by tonetheman on 9/6/23, 11:49 AM
It pleases me greatly that there is a latin stackexchange.
by sandworm101 on 9/6/23, 11:56 AM
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.
by neilkakkar on 9/6/23, 11:36 AM
I'm very confused, why is this so upvoted, someone mind explaining?