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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
by dTal 3y ago
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.
- nicbou 3y agoGerman has many of those moments. It's a brilliant language for very specific uses, like user manuals.
- tetris11 3y agoto dare → herausfordern Eng: "I dare you to drink that" Deu: "Ich fordere dich heraus, das zu trinken." Almost double
- yorwba 3y agoTrink's, wenn du dich traust! (Drink it if you dare.)
- carstenhag 3y ago"Trink's doch!" has pretty much the same meaning, in the correct context. "Just drink it [... if you dare]"
- r0b1n 3y agoIf 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".
- ginko 3y agoDeu: "Ex!" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ex#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ex#German
- h4ckerle 3y agoShortest 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 3y agoUsually 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 3y agoThere 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 3y agoOh 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.
- enkid 3y agoThe 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.
- 93po 3y ago> the complexities on practice are insurmountable. “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” begs to differ
- alcover 3y ago> 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).
- enkid 3y ago
- low_tech_love 3y agoThe 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.
- kangalioo 3y agoIn the linked answer, there's a two-word full answer phrase: > So I would cut this down to something like nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit: "she bade farewell too much before" or "she bade farewell so many times before".
- qsdf38100 3y agoAre you sure? My understanding is that the two words are the full sentence. Édit: I mean in the last paragraph of the answer.
- roblabla 3y agoit... did? Their final answer is: > nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit: "she bade farewell too much before" or "she bade farewell so many times before". nimium/totiēns conveying "too many times before" and "valedīxit" conveying "she said goodbye".
- ace32229 3y agoThe top answer offers this 2 word solution: nimium valedīxit or totiēns valedīxit
- ChrisRR 3y agoI 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 valedīxit": He got too sick "totiēns valedīxit": He was always well Edit: Playing around with google translate, "nim valedīxit" translates to He said goodbye. But "valedīxit" translates to Said goodbye. "Nimium" translates to Too many So somewhere in that complexity it does seem to be that those two words have a meaning that build off eachother for their meaning, but google is considering it literally If anyone has an explanation for these phrases rather than my guess work, I'd love to hear them!
- messe 3y agoChatGPT does well (I gave it the additional info that the subject was female, but that will only change whether it chooses the pronoun he or she): totiēns valedīxit: She said goodbye so many times. nimium valedīxit: She said goodbye too much https://chat.openai.com/share/6d564b0a-c613-4411-a656-735cd9bf29d7 https://chat.openai.com/share/6d564b0a-c613-4411-a656-735cd9...
- mort96 3y agoThat seems like a google translate issue, the word "valedīcō" seems to unambiguously mean bidding farewell (or giving a farewell speech): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedico#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedico#Latin, and valedīxit is unambiguously the "third-person singular perfect active indicative" of valedīcō (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedixit https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valedixit).
- qwerty456127 3y agoI 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 3y agoFew 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 3y agoThere is a word used frequently in the Hebrew Bible that is four letters long ויהי 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 "伥", which Pleco gives as the ghost of a man who fell a victim to a tiger, yet helps the tiger to devour others” https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/6ijiuw/longest_string_of_chinese_characters_to_make_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/6ijiuw/lon...
- thaumasiotes 3y agoLetter 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".
- orangepurple 3y agoThe Polish language also has an insane amount of compression. Example, "to play": https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bcthjo/conjugation_of_a_single_polish_word/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bcthjo/conjugation_o...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coliveira 3y agoLatin 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 3y agoI 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.
- raverbashing 3y agoSo 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 3y agoYes 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 3y ago"she farewelled excessively"
- pavlov 3y agoThe same translation logic works in Finnish: “liikaa hyvästeli” 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.
- esotericimpl 3y ago[dead]
- smaddox 3y agoRoughly the same number of syllables, though.
- wink 3y agoOnly 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]