IMSLP Forums

The oboist Martin Seyfert has been a member of the orchestra of the court in Dresden at least in the years beetwen 1717 and 1733.
According to SLUB he composed three concertos, which are now available at IMSLP. Nothing about his year of birth and death is known.
The composer page contains the entry fl. 1717 - fl. 1733 for his life dates. After some research I know, what this means. But has
everybody the right interpretation of this dates? I would prefer to mark the lifedates as unknown and give the informtion concerning
the years 1717 and 1733 elsewhere.
Notenschreiber

I understand your concern, but the 'fl.' notation is implicitly acknowledging that the actual dates of birth and death are unknown, so we have to make do with years active. Even though it is obviously an imprecise measurement of the composer's lifetime, I feel that it's still useful to include on the same page as the other information we have about the composer. The notation is standard in many different sources.

I’m in agreement with Ken – any dates that were substituted for the end-points of Seyfert’s career might be quite speculative, if the other facts of his life are wholly unknown, and in such case the use of the floruit marking is correct. How old was he when he wrote the works and was employed by the court, a young man or of mature age? Did he live for fifty years afterwards, or died around the same time as the last mentioned date?

Regards, Philip

Notenschreiber wrote:The composer page contains the entry fl. 1717 - fl. 1733 for his life dates. After some research I know, what this means. But has
everybody the right interpretation of this dates?

I doubt that all users of IMSLP understand what fl. means. Even I didn't know about it until the recent thread here in the forums. So, many users will probably understand it as birth and death years, implicating that he died with age 16...

So, yes, I totally agree that replacing the birth/death years with the active work span is definitely confusing to lots of users!

It may be confusing, but as it is standard practice in all major reference works I think we should need a very good reason to change.

Maybe we should have some kind of knowledge base at IMSLP Which explains such things? It would also be useful to have other such knowledge bases as, e.g., computer related stuff like how to download files from libraries atuomatically using curl, how to compile jpgs into one pdf using convert etc.

We could have a button somewhere visible labeled "abbreviations" that takes you to a list, but it would also have to have English translations for some of the words. For instance, I'm not sure everyone would work out floruit. I always used the English "flourished" (though someone with more language knowledge than me will have to say whether that's a correct translation or not).

You’re quite right, “flourished” is the literal translation of the Latin verb. I agree most people are familiar with “circa” and comparably fewer may be au fait with “floruit” — but that is no argument to dispense with the correct terminology, just because it is less familiar. A template to link to a glossary of terms might be a nice option — perhaps also for including musical terms?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floruit

Regards, Philip

What I meant was not to dispense with the original, just to put the translation in addition to it, so it's immediately obvious without having to go to our abbreviations list, and then click on something else to go get the translation. (Wasn't being too clear late at night . . . .)

Some websites use title attributes to explain abbreviations and the like, combined with a dotted underline as a visual cue. Most browsers will display the title attribute as a tooltip on mouse hover. I posted an example at Category:Seyfert, Martin. If you think this might work, we can turn it into a template.

Consider it done?

Two templates, one a general implementation for putting a span around any text with an accompanying title (with "fl." as a specific case), as well as a shorthand one for brevity.

{{Tooltip|display text|floating text}}

{{fl}} does what Leonard's example did, by using {{Tooltip|fl.|floruit (flourishing)}}

Regards, PML

ETA: I notice that of the main European languages German uses “bl.” (for “blühte”) rather than “fl.”, often with an accompanying word in the language that has the Latin “florere” as an underlying root. The meaning is obviously the same, but the German etymology is derived from the German word rather than the Latin.

Great, thanks. I made a few minor changes: the color of the dotted underline can now be changed by a parameter (defaults to black; unfortunately dotted underlines cannot be made with the text-decoration property, which would always have the same color as the text), and I moved the tooltip text to the {{fl}} template, so the {{tooltip}} template doesn't get so crowded when we start internationalizing the tooltip text.

Good ideas both.