Re:In Defense of Latin
by hcarvalhoalves on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @05:13PM
(#21578865)
I just tried a quick translation now looking up the latin dictionary. My native tongue is Portuguese so maybe I'm more used to uncommonly ordered sentences.
My English vocabulary is limited, I had to lookup a better synonym for "long":
Daedalus, meanwhile, on Crete's lingering detested
exile, longing for his birthplacelingering brings other ideas besides "long". something like "fading but still there". does not seem appropriate for the text
Re:In Defense of Latin
by hcarvalhoalves on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @05:54PM
(#21579240)
Doesn't "lingering" have a connotation of "lasting longer than it should" when associated with a negative aspect?
E.g. "lingering pain", "lingering stench".
Also lingering affection.
Afaik, it means mostly something like "still there, after all that time"
How's Portuguese any different in that regard from other Romance languages like Spanish or French?
Re:In Defense of Latin
by umanwizard on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @07:09PM
(#21579832)
I’m not familiar with Portuguese, but for what it’s worth, Spanish has much freer word order than French.
Random example: “I can’t do it” in Spanish can either be no lo puedo hacer or no puedo hacerlo. In colloquial French, j’peux pas l’faire is the only option (or, if you prefer the more standard/formal register: je ne peux pas le faire). This despite “le” and “lo” being direct cognates.
This translation is very nice, but notice for example that the word "long" is itself now no longer long in the translation ("longumque" is longer, both syntactically and also when spoken, and that is made possible in Latin by the suffix "-que" that can be attached to words to mean "and").
Also, many passages cannot be translated so nicely, for example because the translation would become too long to fit the metre, or because too erratic the word order would in English become.