Mysteries of vernacular: Miniature.
通用俗语的谜团：Miniature.
Something distinctively smaller than other members of its type or class.
Miniature指某类东西里的明显缩小品。
Miniature traces its roots to the Latin, 'minium', which meant, "red lead".
Miniature的词源出自拉丁文minium，意思是“红丹”。
Minium referred, in particular, to a compound of lead used as a pigment in Medieval times.
红丹是指一种铅的化合物，它在中世纪被用来当作一种颜料。
In those days, because there were no printing presses,
在当时，因为没有印刷技术，
groups of scribes were tasked with painstakingly copying all books by hand.
抄写员必须煞费苦心地用手抄书。
Whenever they needed to denote a chapter break or a division of text,
每当他们要标注一个章节结尾、或是要将文字分开时，
scribes would switch from standard black to the red pigment, minium.
抄写员就会从标准的黑色颜料换成红色颜料，也就是红丹。

Another important visual device used to increase the prominence of certain portions of text
另外一种让某部分文字变明显的重要视觉方法
was to set them off with large, ornate, and colorful capital letters, often surrounded by tiny, detailed paintings.
是用较大又绚丽的彩色大写字母来书写，旁边通常还有小巧精美的图案。
The Italians began to refer to these elaborate and diminutive paintings as 'miniatura', illuminations.
意大利人开始把这些小巧精美的图画称作miniatura，意思是首字母的彩饰。
Because of the necessarily small size of the paintings, miniatura began to be associated with all things wee
由于这种图样总是很小，miniatura便开始和所有小东西相关联起来，
and spawned to other words with the same base, like the Latin 'minimum', for least.
并且衍生出其他类似的单词，比如拉丁文中的minimum，含义指最小。
Miniatura was transmuted into English in the 16th century as the word, 'miniature',
在16世纪，miniatura演变成了英文中的miniature，
and since that time, it has had the exact same meaning we use today.
而从那时起，它的含义就跟我们今天使用的完全一样了。