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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-
by tail_exchange 3y ago
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).
- bitdivision 3y agoYes, I think similarly in Spanish would be `se despidió demasiado` or `se despidió 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 3y agoIt can be used for both. A better translation for it would be "excessively".
- lopis 3y agoYou lost the gender of the person though, which from my understanding is preserved in Latin with a verb suffix.
- tail_exchange 3y agoThat is true. It could also be used by a "he", so there is a bit of ambiguity.
- trgn 3y agoI'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 3y agoI 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_ 3y agoThe 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."
- trgn 3y agoThat makes a lot of sense, thank you.
- hgsgm 3y agoHow very postmodern.
- vlz 3y agoI think you got that wrong, "valedixit" is just third person perfect, "he/she/it said goodbye", the verb suffix does not encode gender.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoit is not encoded in the verb ending.
- Vox_Leone 3y agoMy 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 3y agoCan't really speak for colloquial pt_BR, but wouldn't that be "demasiadas" instead of "muitas"?
- Vox_Leone 3y ago>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 3y agoEdit: 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 3y ago"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.
- ajuc 3y agoSlavic too. In Polish: żegnała (she said goodbye) za często (literally too often, but used here it would convey the meaning and sound more natural than literal za wiele razy). BTW żegnała encodes the gender. If it was he it would be żegnał. So arguably it's more compressed than latin. BTW2 the real compression happens in conditionals żegnałaby = she would have said goodbye
- Metacelsus 3y agoPolish "za" has so many uses, it's really mind-boggling (as someone learning Polish)
- jacquesm 3y agoInteresting, 'wiele' seems to be a distant cousin to the dutch 'veel' by way of 'viele' (German). More so because 'w' is pronounced as 'v'.
- ajuc 3y agoYup Polish has A LOT of loanwords. Most people don't realize how many. My favorite example is how Polish stole Latin, German and Czech words for color and now each mean different things :) Kolor - color Farba - paint Barwa - hue Also Polish is surprisingly similar to Sanskrit, for example only recently I realized that budzik (alarm clock) pobudka (waking up someone as a noun) and all related bud- words have the same word root as Buddha (the awaken one). Blew my mind :)
- jacquesm 3y agoMy favorites: adidasy (for generic gym shoes) and electrolux (for vacuum cleaner). I'm not sure if those are still in generic use but when I lived there long ago these were Western brands that you simply could not buy in Poland and so the brand names became stand-ins for the objects themselves. The Buddha reference is hilarious!
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoYou can do the same thing in English. She said bye often. 5 syllables.
- elliottkember 3y ago"often" and "too many times" do not have the same meaning at all
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoNeither 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 3y agoThat'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.