Do we want list-of-languages questions?

Question

Identifying languages with some specified language feature is a frequent activity, both for natural languages and conlangs. WALS and CALS are popular resources for seeing how common various options are. But they don't have every feature, nor every language.

The Linguistics site has a tag, list-of-languages. Tagged questions can ask about languages which meet a particular set of criteria, and are usually allowed to stay open, despite the usual Stack Exchange rule against list questions. (Only 6 out of 127 have been closed so far.) This seems to work quite well. They're not necessarily the best questions ever, but they meet a need that otherwise wouldn't be met, and they have so far avoided the problems which plagued other sites' list questions.

Do we want to allow similar questions here? And do we want all kinds of these list-of-languages questions, or only the ones asking about linguistic features (those are the only ones common or allowed on Linguistics.SE)?

Here are some we've received already:

• Questions about linguistic features

  • Do any conlangs have verbs that change form depending on the object?
  • Are there conlangs using constructed sounds?
  • Languages where the part of speech of a root is "fixed"?
  • Use of string reversion in conlangs

• Questions about social features or purposes

  • Are there any constructed languages designed for legal agreements / country constitutions?
  • List of conlangs whose goal is to minimize ambiguity [Undeleted and reopened]

• Questions about conlang origins

  • Are there any examples of artificial creoles of natural languages?
  • Conlangs based on lesser known antique languages
  • Greek-based altlangs

Answer 1

I think that list-of-language questions are a useful contribution to this site. They are usually answerable, and the potential answers add value to the site.

They also may satisfy my curiousity and point me to Conlangs with interesting features that I have never encountered before.

I think the tag wiki should be similar to the on in [linguistics.se]; the lists should contain Conlangs matching well-defined and narrowed criteria given in the question.

Answer 2

I want to propose letting this issue rest unanswered until we are out of private and in public beta and public beta has been around for a bit.

At the moment, we want to seed our site with some good starting questions before it is opened to the general public. Whatever we decide to allow (or forbid) now will be taken as some sort of precedence rule further on. Of course, our policies can always be changed but some policy changes are harder than others.

I don’t think that there is a clear good or bad, right or wrong answer to the question a priori, we’ll have to see how they work out in practice. It could be that list-of-languages questions are few and far between and generally very interesting. It could be that they quickly dominate and become an obnoxious problem. And any other combination or anything in between. Even if we set precedence now with a nice list question that we can all agree on, that may (or may not) open the floodgates of terrible ones within months.

I have been on Anime & Manga and witnessed how the single most popular question type—identification-request—went from disliked but allowed to banhammered. The process was tedious because of how immensely popular these questions were. But it had to be done because only an infinitesimally small number of users actually bothered to read the guidelines and it was all just a way for people to gain badges in the close vote review queue. I suspect that there was very early precedence that just unfolded in a very bad way. In the end, the mods went through and deleted all questions except for a few exemplary one worth retaining which were fitted with a historical lock. Even with these few remaining, the blacklisted tag remained the highest-used.

Because of the work that all of this was, it is best if we put off the final decision until we see what it is actually going to turn into when the site goes live and attracts traffic through Google.

Answer 3

I think we have them regularly enough (see also, which prompted me to come and ask the same question) in regard with the size of the site. More importantly, they hard to answer because there's just not enough variety of languages with a lot of material available to answer them! Most people know the big commercial conlangs, maybe a few other conlanger's work (e.g. Zompist's work)... and that's it.

Outside of Zompist and the conlangs in published fictional materials (Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones...), most people can't really talk about more than 2 or three conlangs, and the material for those are probably not online, and the result is little variety in answer to those questions (besides they're usually amounting "I want to know because I wanna for something unique", which is not a good reasoning in conlanging IMO).

TLDR answer:

1. People usually don't ask these questions (or formulations of questions) to improve their conlanging or share knowledge. They mostly ask it out of a misplaced desire for originality.
2. There's not enough possible variance in answers (there's maybe some 20 possible conlangs people can base their answers on) for these questions to be useful.