In the last couple of days I was in a kind of clean-up rage and crawled all the tags on our site, edited a few (going to add some exceprts to the yet description-less tags when I have the time) and would like to discuss some cases that seem a bit problematic to me:
- list-of-languages: I already edited the description of it, but I still find the name pretty difficult to hit on when you haven't seen it beofre. Shouldn't we rather rename it to "language-request" or something similar?
language-identification Why does this tag even exist - didn't we define such questions as out of the scope of this site?It is now, but once was on-topic and we should just leave the existing questions as-is- natural-languages Seems a bit redundant - remove?
- history It was already discussed here, but without a real solution: What do we want to have this tag for? Do we refer to historical linguistics (then I would rather use the historical-linguistics directly), history of linguistic theory (then we should consider renaming it to "history-of-linguistics" or "history-of-theory" or something) or the influence of historical context on the development of languages (but this should then again boil down to historical-linguistics or sometimes sociolinguistics)? Proposal by Alenanno: rename it to "histocial-context"
- ancient This is not very expressive - I would rather go with more accurate tags like "ancient-greek" or "ancient-hebrew" etc.
- symbol This is used pretty unhomogeneously. Most of these questions are about writing systems, unicode or IPA where there is already tags for that; the rest are not really linguistic questions i.m.o. (such as a question about emoticons). The only question with a reasonable use of the tag I found so far is this one, but looking at the other questions tagged with this tag, "symbol" doesn't really help classifying questions into a more or less homogeneous group of interest which makes its need questionable. Should we delete the tag and, if necessary, change the tags of the few remaining question to others? I would suggest using it in the context of semiotics, like in the question I linked, but then we should careful that it doesn't overlap with writing-systems, ipa etc.
- marking - ambiguous again; both used as markedness and morphology - should we better restrict it to one meaning; if so, which one, or should we remove it completely and simply re-tag the existing four questions?
variation - seems to be used very unhomogeneously again - what to do with it? I'd say we use it in the sanse of language variation (dialects, sociolects, ...) - but we need an informative tag wiki then.
lexical-relations -
only three questions, one about semantics, one about verbs, one about syntax - do we need it?A tag wiki has been suggested, the wrongly tagged questions removed, and more questions tagged correctlynumbers is always only used in the sense of numerals (which makes sense since this is a linguistics and not a mathematics site). We now have tag wikis so in the future they will hopefully be used appropriately, but I'm still wondering whether there is a good use for numbers here?
- research - it's either about reference-request or any of the other tags (like research questions about English, historical linguistics etc.), so it's not really needed - or we should add a precise tag wiki
synatx - This is a typoremoved
Additionally, I would suggest merging or synonymising a bunch of tags (is the direction relevant?):
- resources - resource-request - online-resources - reference-request - references Proposal by Alenanno: reference-request for essays, papers etc, resource-request for corpora etc. - I find that a useful distrinciton. What about the rest then?
- vocabulary - lexicon
- word-classes - parts-of-speech
- constructed-language - conlang
- grammatical-number - number
- origin-of-language - evolutionary-linguistics
- computer-science - computational-linguistic - nlp I think we'd need to discuss the current tag synonymy of computational-linguistics and nlp in a separate thread, opinions on that apparently vary
- morphemes - morphology - one is the subject of study of the other, but in which question context couldn't both of the tags be used?
- discourse - discourse-analysis
- stops - plosives
- writing - writing-systems
- proper-nouns - proper-names - names
thematic-roles - theta-roleagreed with what Alenanno wrote- meaning - semantics
- diachronic - historical-linguistics or language-change
- constituency - constituents
- annotated-data - annotation
- dependency - dependency-grammar
- slavic - slavic-languages
- software - nlp - So far, all of the software-tagged questions are about NLP tools. But skimming through the questions, possibly the difference is that the former is usually rather requests for existing tools, while the latter is used for problems in creating NLP software? If so, I'd be okay with leaving them separately, but then we should be more specific about theird intended usage in the tag wikis.
- tools - nlp - same as with software
Others that have rather few usage could easily be subsumed under more general terms:
- sociophonetics - Do we need an own tag for this? This field is sufficiently covered by sociolinguistics and phonetics i.m.o.
- graphemics and diacritics - aren't these subsumed under writing-systems?
- dialect-mapping - only two questions - subsume under dialects?
- prestige - only two quetsions - subsume under sociolinguistics?
- toponmastics - I have never heard that term before, couldn't we just subsume this under proper-names?
And other tags are so extremely specific in their scope or unique to one particular question used I doubt that they will ever be used so one might actually delete them:
- spe
- wonderwort (What is this? jknappen says it looks like a misspelling of "wanderwort" - I'd say we don't need that one, is sufficiently covered by etymology already)
- philology
- translation-quality
- nominalisation
- grammatical
There were some more that were rather specific or seldomly used, but the ones above seemed the most redundant to me.
I don't expect you to discuss extensively on every bullet point I made - a comment on one or a few points or if someone could do the tag synonyms (I don't have enough reputation to do that on my own) would already be nice.