Some tag proposals

Question

Open questions

• I think a general principle to follow is that most tags shouldn't have "language" or "conlang" in them. Exceptions would be when it's explicitly distinguishing conlang and natlangs, or when there's already a set phrase with "language" in it. Language change is one such example, so the language-change tag for questions on natural developments of conlangs is appropriate.

• We've had a few questions about what is required to be a "complete" language. I'm not sure what a good tag could be for those. Idea: what about conlang-mvp? Too cute?

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What we've settled on (though feel free to still contest these tags)

• For questions on conlangs changing over time, we have decided on both language-change and diachronics.

• And what about a tag unnatural-features for questions about designing conlang features with no parallels in natural languages?

• We probably need to better distinguish between typology and classification.

• What do we want for tags about writing systems? writing-systems

• Having both phrase and single word requests at ELU is a mess. Lets simplify things from the beginning, and have a single tag: phrase-requests.

• The texts tag is a meta tag, and I don't see how it would be useful to have. I'd say we burn it.

  • For questions like the one on the Lord's Prayer, what about a tag like conlang-promotion?

• conlang-history can probably just be history - we're not here to discuss world history! I'd include in this tag both the history of constructed languages as a discipline, as well as key moments in the development of particular languages, from the human side of development, though not for questions about the development of languages themselves, which should be language-change. history for questions about people, language-change for questions about languages themselves, if that makes sense.

• words seems like a pretty useless tag. Can anyone make a case for it?

  Maybe vocabulary-development for questions like these?

  • Methods to avoid similarity in lexicons
  • What's a good starting place to work on vocab?

  I renamed it to vocabulary.

Answer 1

Writing a new answer because I’ve thought a bit more about the whole thing. Here’s my proposed solution:

1. For questions related to a specific well-known language, always use a language-specific tag, e.g. tolkien-sindarin. Don’t tag your own project that no one has heard of like that though. Don’t use any -language or -conlang suffixes for these, that’s just redundant. E.g. klingon not klingon-language

   a. For questions about how such a conlang was developed, changed during its development, and also how it was received or adapted by learners, conlang-history seems appropriate as an additional tag.

2. For questions about how to make a conlang, I suggest conlang-creation.

   a. For questions which are relevant to a specific subfield of linguistics, additional tags such as phonology would be appropriate.

   b. I would also like to emphasize that simulating natural language change is a thing that some conlangers do, here diachronics is particularly appropriate.

3. Various questions regarding conlanging terminology can take a terminology tag, and similarly for classification stuff there can be classification

4. Questions about creating scripts (including stuff like making fonts) get neography, questions about writing in general writing-systems. Overlap exists, but shouldn’t be cause for worry.

   a. For certain constructed scripts such as Tengwar, specific tags might be appropriate.

   b. What is our opinion on spelling reforms? Are such discussions even on-topic? If yes, spelling-reform might be useful. This also in particular relates to projects like Blisssymbolics or Pan-Germanic Logograms which lie in a grey zone between writing system and conlang but ought to be on-topic here.

Answer 2

language-development is an annoyingly ambiguous name. My personal suggestion for tags of this kind would be:

• lang-creation for questions about how to make languages

• lang-change or lang-history for questions about how conlangs changed over time through revisions seem alright, I don’t see the need to differentiate (and personally would probably favour the latter tag)

• diachronics for how natural languages change, which is obviously a very different set of questions. Also appropriate here would be questions of the sorts of how native speakers altered a conlang (really only applicable to Esperanto at the moment)

Answer 3

TLA's (aka Three letter acronyms) aren't good tags (or part of good tags, as in the proposed conlang-mvp) because

• Many people don't get them at first sight
• TLA's usually don't have a unique resolution and conflicting usuages might be conflated in one tag
• TLA based tags are hard to suggest: When I am looking for suitable tags for my questions I often enter a "suspicious" substring of the tag and watch the autosuggested tags from the site.