Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 December 16

= December 16 =

ꬹ character
What's the purpose of having a "LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH MIDDLE RING"? It appears in the Latin Extended-E character set, which comprises "Latin script characters used in German dialectology (Teuthonista), Sakha and Americanist usage" [i.e. specialised linguistic purposes]. But if I run it through Google, most of the results use it decoratively (e.g. this Turkish sports site) or merely provide a lot of unusual characters, and the few exceptions are pages (example, Unicode specifications for the Warang Citi script) that appear to be false positives. Nyttend (talk) 00:28, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * This is the proposal document that led to the encoding. It lists this character among the "German dialectology" ones and also provides some snippets from earlier print publications that used it. From the example given on p.41 of the document, it seems to be used for some particular variant of syllabic "l" (the word being transcribed seems to be "Stückel" or "Stickel"). Fut.Perf. ☼ 00:43, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Teuthonista has a link to the Handbuch zum Zeichensatz SMFTeuthonista by Sibylle Reichel, which describes the function of ꬹ as follows:
 * " dental/alveolarer Lateral mit engeren seitlichen Öffnungen, die Zunge liegt am Gaumen auf größerer Fläche an. "Hackl"-l " - Lindert (talk) 00:59, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Delin: et sculp
On the bottom right corner of this image on commons is: Wenceslas Hollar • Delin: et sculp: 1666, What does the (Latin?) bit after the author's name signify? Was the illustration created in 1666? The event depicted occurred in 1666. —107.15.157.44 (talk) 01:18, 16 December 2018 (UTC)


 * That’s short for delineavit et sculpsit, which means "[he, that is Hollar] drew and engraved [the image]", so it’s simply the artist’s signature. Cheers ✦  hugarheimur 01:45, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Thx! —107.15.157.44 (talk) 02:10, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

naifve
Google translate isn't able to translate "naifve" in the following (17th century French):
 * Livre curieux contenant la naifve representation des habits des femmes des diverses parties du monde comme elles s'habillent a present

I suspect it means "new" or maybe "naive" or "native". (?) —107.15.157.44 (talk) 04:00, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I'd say that it's an earlier form of French naïve, the meaning of which, when referring to artworks, is given here as "qui décrit, qui représente la réalité telle qu'elle est ou en la simplifiant, sans rechercher d'effet". Deor (talk) 04:13, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks. That definition differs somewhat from the common interpretation of "naive"; I noticed that naive and native are considered linguistic doublets -- interesting. "Naive" will have to do for my purposes.  Thanks again! —107.15.157.44 (talk) 04:29, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Naïve art. Bus stop (talk) 04:40, 16 December 2018 (UTC)