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Different worlds share the same races, but use different languages. For example Elves. Everybody who wants Elves in their world might create his own language, no matter if someone did it already. Tolkien created his own and I don't think he's the only one.

How should we handle this case in the tag system? Should we have generalized tags, ex or more precise ones, ex ? Maybe we should have both? Or should we use them with other tags, ex together with ?

2 Answers 2

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More precise tags

Neither nor is a good name for a tag on this site:

  • isn't a good tag name, because Tolkien invented so many different languages, and the topics of interest here are the languages themselves and not him;
  • definitely isn't a good tag name, because there are many different (and entirely unrelated) languages called "elvish" in different works of fantasy, and someone who's an expert in one won't necessarily know anything at all about another.

We should definitely be using tags like , rather than and . (I've already made a lot of edits to various posts changing the latter to the former.) That's an easy tag for people to favourite if they're experts in Tolkien's elvish languages, and it will come up in the tag list if people search for either tolkien or elvish.

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  • Even tolkien-elvish is not good. It should be Sindarin, Telerin etc.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Feb 7, 2018 at 0:41
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    @curiousdannii You may be right ... but we've also had a few questions already about Tolkien's Elvish languages in general. Not everyone knows the difference between Sindarin and Quenya, or would know to search for names like those. I think it's good that people can search the tags for elvish and find this tag. We can add sindarin and the rest as synonyms.
    – Rand al'Thor
    Feb 7, 2018 at 0:49
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    The original question askers don't have to get the correct tags on their first try, the community can always fix them later. Depending on the volume of questions a single tolkien-languages may end up best.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Feb 7, 2018 at 0:52
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I don't think we should have generic race names

This site is about creating/learning constructed languages, not about building worlds. It should not be necessary to have tags referring to races living in any world(s) in order to write/understand a question. It might still be part of the question body, but tagging should be about elements that categorize the questions.

As the races are just as invented as the languages those invented folks that speak a language are tightly bound to the specific language, thus there's no real point in having two separate tags.

Tags that refer to existing con-languages, such as on the other hand sound like a good idea and should definitely be a thing.

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