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.
The point you raise is one of the things most people -- professional translators, even -- get very, very wrong when translating (books, movie subtitles, game dialogue, you name it).
"How do you say 'phrase' in [target language]?" is more often than not a much worse approach than "What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?".
"What would a native speaker of [target language]
say if they found themselves in the same situation?".
It gets even trickier if you are translating fiction. If you are translating, say, Japanese anime/manga with a Japanese setting for an English-speaking audience you don't necessarily want the characters to sound like Americans or Brits or Canadians or what have you.
So you may have to use language that Americans understand, but still make them sound Japanese. Somehow.
For anything remotely poetic (including song lyrics), I like to hear more literal translations, because the creative turns of phrase is is what makes them enjoyable.
Given this fact, one of the most amazing things to me is when a song can be translated relatively faithfully and while preserving the rhyme structure. It just blows my mind to listen to a song in another language with English subtitles and have it line up close enough to the English and still rhyming in their seperate tongue.
There are several translations of Harry Potter books to Russian language. Some translations keep names a is - Longbottom or Ravenclaw. While others translate them to Russian. There is (or rather was) so much love and hate about both options.
> the actual phrase he says may be completely different
That's also true in English, in my experience. I've never heard someone express this phrase (or a variation) in conversation, but the sentiment is common.
A typical phrasing in English would be more like "She always says she's done but she always comes back."
Ha, I've never really listened in to the rest of the words and kinda assumed the meaning was "she left many people" with "too many" indicating loneliness. TIL
Given that this is meant to be poetic it is likely that a Roman would have said it in Greek, which was considered a more "cultured" language than mere boorish Latin.
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].
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.
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).
Slavic 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
Yes, 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?
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.
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.
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).
And, of course, speaking of Lesbia (traditionally identified as Clodia Metelli, otherwise known as Quadrantaria), one should mention her “sparrow” mentioned in Catullus 2: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/catul.... Reading that article again I saw a tidbit I missed before: “As Richard Hooper has recently pointed out, ‘in Egyptian hieroglyphics the determinative for “little, evil, bad” was … śerau, the sparrow’”. And so it is: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sparrow_(hiero....
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.
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
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?
Honestly they were just there in the Wikipedia text I copied. I've seen them in more modern texts to help with pronunciations and translation (if I recall correctly some words have different meanings depending on the length of the final vowel but that can normally be determined from context). Romans sometimes used the apex to denote long vowels which would have otherwise been ambiguous but I think it wasn't as commonplace as in textbooks today.
They’re length markers. There’s also the rarely used ˘ to show that a vowel be read short instead of long.
At least in my gymnasium in Switzerland we had the length markers for all the words, from the very beginning, and in all texts we read and all grammar forms we learned.
6 years of Latin in school (only two years ago), at least officially a Latinum (German proof of knowing Latin) - and I don't understand a single sentence. Granted, I never had to learn understanding spoken language, but still.. Maybe it's time to reactivate what's left of my knowledge
Latin has a great introductory textbook called Lingua Latina per se illustrata by Hans Ørberg. I only got through the first book, so I'm no expert, but this is the one everybody recommends. And it's really neat: there is no English in the book at all, it's all Latin from page one, building up from really simple words and grammar in a logical way.
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.
I always heard it as "She's said goodbye too many times before," but that was probably my mind filling in the gap. Also, I never heard the rest of the lyrics so I don't know if they're present or past tense.
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"How do you say 'phrase' in [target language]?" is more often than not a much worse approach than "What would a native speaker of [target language] say if they found themselves in the same situation?".
So you may have to use language that Americans understand, but still make them sound Japanese. Somehow.
That's also true in English, in my experience. I've never heard someone express this phrase (or a variation) in conversation, but the sentiment is common.
A typical phrasing in English would be more like "She always says she's done but she always comes back."
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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...
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.
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
Does demais in portuguese mean too much, or too many times?
(*) 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]'
She said bye often.
5 syllables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjOfQfxmTLQ
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.
Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).
Can you clarify what a "mate" is? What determines a word's "mate"? The position on the line? Their meaning?
The structure we see here is x0 and y0, ...z0 / z1... y1 and x1.
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
At least in my gymnasium in Switzerland we had the length markers for all the words, from the very beginning, and in all texts we read and all grammar forms we learned.
Are there any resources that you have enjoyed over the years for learning Latin or engaging in material written in Latin?
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Dead Comment
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.
like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbEKIW3pUUk
https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/
Deleted Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...
Kind of like that that can be similarly strange
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_that_is_is_that_that_is_n...