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

[phendrenad2]

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.

[teleforce]

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...

[jltsiren]

Latin grammar is literally trivial, because it was a part of the trivium in traditional liberal arts education.

You did not study the grammar in order to use the language but to understand the structure of it. You also studied logic to understand the structure of ideas and arguments, and rhetoric to communicate them. Then you proceeded to the quadrivium to study arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy.

[tail_exchange]

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).

[nickspacek]

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

[VikingCoder]

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]

I was learning Latin at the time I watched that movie. Fell off the sofa, laughing, during that scene :)

[Tao3300]

Nothing better captures the feeling of being put on the spot by ones Latin teacher.

[academia_hack]

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.

[bshimmin]

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 "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).

[haste410]

> 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?

[sharikous]

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

[leephillips]

What an amazing comment. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this.

[saaaaaam]

I'm curious about why you've added what I assume are stress marks in the Latin. I studied it (admittedly, a while back) all my way through school and have never once seen this used, including in this poem. In no way a criticism of me trying to make a thing about it - is it an American thing?

[leoc]

If you listen to some podcasts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNbsJ-QimQo you should hopefully be able to maintain your Latin.

[ToDougie]

Incredible post, I really appreciate you taking the time to share.

Are there any resources that you have enjoyed over the years for learning Latin or engaging in material written in Latin?

[jackcosgrove]

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.

[whimsicalism]

As a native english speaker, I feel like "She'd said goodbye too many times before" better conveys the meaning for me.

[Lio]

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

[bitdivision]

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

[jll29]

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

[VikingCoder]

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?

[schoen]

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!

[eindiran]

That reminds me of this: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Lingua_abstrusa

[penguin_booze]

For a change of scenery, here's your Latin 101: https://youtu.be/0lczHvB3Y9s.

[lr4444lr]

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.

[alcover]

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.

[hashar]

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.

[tail_exchange]

You can reduce "demasiadamente" to just "demais". I realized later that I was being silly. That would be 7 syllables.

[tragomaskhalos]

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).

[r0b1n]

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.

[umanwizard]

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.

[erremerre]

Spanish:

Despidiose excesivamente. 10

[grokkedit]

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 già detto addio troppe volte` instead

[oblio]

Romanian:

11

Ea și-a luat adio de prea multe ori (înainte = before, optional).

9

Ea și-a luat adio excesiv.

8

Ea și-a luat adio prea mult.

[ajuc]

I'd skip "się" and reverse the word order. "Żegnała za często" sounds better and more poetic ;)

If you want to include "before" (which Lating skipped): "Żegnała już za często"

[TheMatten]

    slovak
    7 - Priveľa sa lúčila
    8 (with "before"/"already") - Priveľa sa už lúčila

[oneshtein]

In Ukrainian: 9 - «прощавалася забагато»

[marcodiego]

The most natural translation in modern Portuguese is "Ela disse adeus vezes demais antes."

[self_awareness]

polish 7 (8) - Zbyt często się (już) żegnała

Although it's possible to drop "się" 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 często już żegnała

[niyaven]

I mean technically I would translate "nimium valedīxit" 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.

[dejj]

Literal Code Golf.

[DeTheBug]

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

[exitb]

Is that a way an actual native speaker would phrase it, or is it just Latin golf that would sound out of place?

[leke]

My favourite part was - Saves valuable chisel time.

[da39a3ee]

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.

[fillipvt]

In Spanish this would look like "dijo adiós demasiado". Although unsure how to fit the "before" without being too literal.