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Some of you may have noticed I've tried to write the tag wiki excerpts for some tags and I've noticed some other people have contributed some too.

But there's some I find difficult because they overlap a little so I'd like to ask if somebody would like to take a stab at them, preferably someone who's a better writer than me and knows the fields:

  • - a specific discipline within linguistics, should include the word "diachronic"
  • - more a phenomenon than a discipline, right, but also should include the word "diachronic" I think
  • - a much more general tag which will sometimes co-occur with one of the others but has already been used for other kinds of questions I think

Keep in mind that the wording and amount of space for a tag wiki excerpt is limited by how the Tags page works. It does automatic truncation and you can't see the results in advance. Typically it will cut off anything up to and including the word "is" and it will chop the end off after a certain point.

Here's one example excerpt which seems to be at the limit of not getting mutilated:

The language family covering the majority of the languages of Europe and the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent.

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  • How do you make the tags show up like that?
    – Louis Rhys
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 12:52
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    @LouisRhys: Typing [tag:history] will appear as you see above. There are lots of goodies under the 'advanced help' link in the editor.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 13:37
  • See also this question specifically about the history tag: "What to do about the history tag?"
    – hippietrail
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 14:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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How about:

  • historical-linguistics: The diachronic study of language and its evolution.
  • language-change: The phenomenon whereby a language's grammar and lexicon change over time.
  • history: History is the study of past events. Use this tag if your linguistic question is also related to history.
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  • Just a few minor points: Try to keep them uniform. Two start with a capital letter and one doesn't. Try not to use Wikipedia text verbatim in an excerpt because it attribution and excerpts are short of space. Avoid the word "is" because it makes the excerpt get automatically abbreviated in an ugly way in the Tags page.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 19:45
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    Want to make your answer community wiki so that other people can improve your suggestions? It would make sense to edit them in place except few (no?) participants have enough reputation to make live edits to the tag wikis.
    – Aaron
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 4:14
  • @Aaron made it cw. Thanks. I didn't think about it.
    – Louis Rhys
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 4:27
  • Thanks. I added my proposed changes. I tightened up the wording for historical-linguistics and trimmed down the list of things that can change in language-change. I didn't do anything to history, because I'm not sure whether we should have it as a tag. I think I will make another meta question about that now.
    – Aaron
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 5:09
  • They look fine to my non expert eyes. Please add them as tag wikis and get yourself some reputation points before I do it for you (-; Oh but watch out there is still one "is" in the last one which might or might not cause ugly automatic truncation in the Tabs page.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Sep 24, 2011 at 16:00
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    @hippie done :)
    – Louis Rhys
    Commented Sep 24, 2011 at 16:22
  • Okay, these edits should now be approved. (I think I got all the tags, for both the "tag wiki" and "tag wiki excerpt".)
    – Aaron
    Commented Oct 4, 2011 at 18:42

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