All Questions
93
questions
2
votes
1answer
237 views
Linguistics Community FAQ
(Under construction!)
You may also wish to review the community FAQ for all sites in the StackExchange network.
Content
About the site
Do you hold regular chat events?
How can we promote ...
4
votes
2answers
149 views
Is this question about etymology and meaning really off-topic?
This question, as I stated in the final section and in the title, is about the etymology and meaning of "atturna" in Sicilian. It mentions a piece of a song because it is the only place where I found ...
7
votes
1answer
2k views
FAQ: Linguistics disciplines and sub-disciplines
What are the various fields that belong to Linguistics?
9
votes
8answers
244 views
Promoting the site
Edit notification
This question has been merged with an old one "Bad Statistics, what can we do?" since they refer to the same topic, although the other one was old. Instead of closing as a ...
12
votes
12answers
371 views
Sites shutting down, what is our position?
I'd like everyone of you to be aware of the fact that some SE sites are being shut down.
What is our position? Today, April 26th 2012 our stats are the following (you can see the stats here):
It's ...
7
votes
4answers
914 views
What is the meaning of “Language-specific grammar and usage questions are off-topic unless primarily concerned with linguistics rather than usage”
One of the 3 custom reasons for closing a question is the “Language-specific” property, expressed in the check-box item “Language-specific grammar and usage questions are off-topic unless primarily ...
26
votes
3answers
434 views
Use of LaTeX commands
It appears that LaTeX commands cannot be used on SE Linguistics, but they can on other SE sites. Personally, I wanted to use this feature a number of times to insert a formula and here's another ...
9
votes
3answers
177 views
IPA Keyboard userscript for you!
Apparently, you folks could do with an IPA Keyboard1. So, here you go!
The most useful feature (IMO) are the keyboard shortcuts, you may want to check out how to use them (details on the page I ...
6
votes
3answers
376 views
Better font for rendering IPA (esp. diacritics)
A few years ago there was a discussion here about how to facilitate IPA entry. A user kindly provided this stack app to provide a fly-out keyboard, and in addition there are lots of online character ...
4
votes
5answers
126 views
Should we welcome via Community Wiki useful questions that don't have concrete or single answers?
The specific question that has been the subject of must discussion that inspires this post is the following one:
What are the current fronts of the linguistics wars?
Now, this is a question that was ...
13
votes
2answers
300 views
Should we make questions about specific syntax trees off topic?
Am I the only one who sees a problem with "Help me with this syntax tree" questions?
I think they don't work at all for the Stack Exchange Q&A format for several reasons:
There's no intuitive ...
3
votes
1answer
95 views
FAQ: A guide to moderation: Voting to close a question
What does it mean to close a question? Who can do it? Why should you do it?
This is a very nice guide provided by Ninefingers on the Cryptography Meta Site. Following the example from other sites and ...
12
votes
3answers
212 views
Should we include Esperanto in our scope?
Before now, we have excluded conlangs from our scope, but Esperanto is on a whole different level. For example, it has native speakers.
If Esperanto will be considered on topic, questions about it ...
11
votes
0answers
199 views
Bad statistics, what can we do? [closed]
I just saw the current statistics and to be honest, they are very poor. I noticed there were few questions, and this means few people that keep coming back to the site, and this means few visits from ...
6
votes
3answers
266 views
The need for changing our guidelines for etymology questions
This question is prompted by What's going on with the Russian etymology questions?
In this particular case, most of his questions are quite universally negatively voted. Though this is the first ...
2
votes
0answers
298 views
#5 Linguistics Meeting
Following the Meta discussion Let's create a regular chat event!, let's post the necessary information for the next Linguistics Meeting.
Keep checking this post for updates!
Want to read ...
16
votes
2answers
140 views
How should we facilitate IPA entry?
The two main options I see are as follows:
Just have people do it in Unicode. It would probably be useful in that case to link to or create a nice repository of common symbols in the FAQs to ...
11
votes
3answers
320 views
The future of Linguistics SE
Recently I've been contacting a user that I thought didn't see that Linguistics entered Beta. To my slight surprise, this person told me that she actually visited Linguistics at first but then lost ...
11
votes
2answers
117 views
Should we allow highly open-ended questions like “do any languages have feature X”?
Some examples off the top of my head:
Are there any languages without fricatives?
What language has the most points of stop consonant articulation?
Are there any languages without at least a first-...
4
votes
2answers
73 views
FAQ: Linguistic Terminology
I have problems understanding some answers/questions because the terminology being used is too technical. Where can I find out what is the meaning of a particular term?
Return to FAQ index
4
votes
5answers
270 views
Pro-tem moderator nominations [closed]
Well we've been around more than a week and are now open to the public. Stack Exchange likes to appoint pro-tem moderators at about the two week mark so it's high time to nominate some contributors ...
3
votes
1answer
55 views
FAQ: Do you hold regular chat events?
Some SE sites hold regular events on different topics, so I was wondering:
does Linguistics have chat events?
Are they regular?
When is the next one?
Return to FAQ index
10
votes
1answer
154 views
Can we have more possible migration targets?
Linguistics.SE tends to attract various language-specific grammar and usage questions, which are off-topic here—we even have a special close reason specifically for that case.
But many of these would ...
9
votes
5answers
145 views
Etymology questions and close votes
Recently I've noticed multiple questions about etymology getting close votes and, in at least one case, actually getting closed. The reason given was that language specific usage and grammar questions ...
8
votes
0answers
170 views
Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
7
votes
3answers
109 views
Do we have questions to migrate to Language Learning.SE?
With the new site, Language Learning.SE, I'm asking myself whether we have some questions to migrate to there.
Do we have some tags that can be more or less safely declare offtopic, since it is on-...
6
votes
2answers
99 views
Which etymology questions should be within or topic scope?
In another meta question I tried to gauge to what extent we should be able to overlap our scope with indivicual language & usage existing sites, proposed site (and as yet not proposed sites).
Not ...
6
votes
1answer
79 views
Can we give better guidance on questions
TL;PR
The help center gives some positive guidance about on-topic matters, and some negative guidance about what not to do. There is a specific point about the "Not 'Please make me a tree'" rule ...
6
votes
2answers
109 views
Let's create a regular chat event!
Now that we have our fantastic Community Bulletin, we can advertise our chat better and work in order to make this site more populated. So I was thinking: why not organize chat events? These ones ...
6
votes
2answers
198 views
Any objections to my formal addition of language identification to our list of off-topic questions?
The topic of what to do with language identification requests has come up several times already. However, based on how often regulars here have been closing such questions, (A.) I took the liberty of ...
5
votes
3answers
381 views
Should we include Conlangs in our scope?
The Conlang SE has been closed deleted and I can't find a new one, so they're probably not restarting it for now. We get questions now and then and I don't really like closing them, but our FAQ is ...
2
votes
1answer
119 views
Migration from English.SE
It has been suggested on the English Meta that questions regarding linguistic topics there should be copied to Linguistics.SE and then closed on EL&U. Now that Linguistics.SE has been launched, ...
0
votes
2answers
61 views
What to do about the history tag?
Should we have a tag called history? In one of its usages, it is synonymous with historical-linguistics. In the other usage, it is about non-linguistic history – the history of a theory, social ...
8
votes
2answers
92 views
Merge with natural language processing
I have asked on area51 whether Linguistics would include natural language processing, the most voted answer being for a merge of the proposals.
Is it taken into account? How would the merge be done? ...
7
votes
1answer
115 views
Typography/style conventions
Derived from french.stackexchange's one.
As we have already one question dealing with typography and formatting issues and as there will likely be many of these, I think it would be fitting to set ...
19
votes
5answers
209 views
Would questions about writing systems be off-topic?
Should this site cover only spoken language or also written language, including alphabets and other writing systems? Or should it allow the latter only to a certain degree that overlaps spoken ...
11
votes
3answers
133 views
Cleaning up the tags
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 ...
10
votes
2answers
213 views
Feature request: Let us easily write in IPA and tree diagrams
Giving an IPA transcription or a tree is very often necessary in discussing linguistics topics, but it is exceedingly slow and painful to do it here, because the editing software seems to have no ...
9
votes
6answers
128 views
On closing “questions asked in good faith”
In this question's comments, @hippietrail commented
... on the subject of constructiveness, I firmly believe downvoting or
closing questions asked in good faith in the earliest days of a new
...
8
votes
3answers
126 views
How should we format glosses on linguistics.SE?
What will be our best choice of formatting for including glosses of foreign language samples in our questions?
6
votes
3answers
314 views
What is the difference between Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing?
On another site, https://cs.stackexchange.com/, I wondered why we had a
tag for Computational Linguistics and another for Natural Language
Processing? I suggested in meta a merge as I did not seem to ...
5
votes
4answers
72 views
What would be a good tag for questions of the type “Are there languages with XYZ?”
We're getting a pretty solid bunch of tags for linguistics concepts, but most SE sites also have tags for kinds of questions which are useful too, especially when we identify the trends.
One trend is ...
4
votes
3answers
204 views
Challenge Weeks Database
This is the Meta question we use to group all the previous Weeks!
Each answer is a Challenge Week, where you can see the questions asked for that Challenge, the topic and of course, the winner
If ...
4
votes
0answers
59 views
Change request for linguistics.stackexchange CSS font-family list
Recently I raised a question on meta.linguistics.stackexchange about which fonts are used to render text formatted as code. Briefly: linguists often need to add diacritics to distinguish speech sounds,...
3
votes
1answer
144 views
Modality, mood, and modal verbs
As a follow on to these comments, I have gone through a retagged a bunch of questions about modality or mood. I have also suggested these tag wikis:
modality:
The grammatical category of modality ...
3
votes
4answers
146 views
Should we accept only questions on theoretical linguistics topics?
Actually I'm not totally sure what is and isn't theoretical linguistics myself, I assumed it would be stuff like X-bar theory and generative grammar and anything with really difficult to read research ...
3
votes
7answers
104 views
What would you like to see as our challenge week topics?
It's time to propose the topics for our Challenge Week!
Some notes:
Propose one topic per answer (make it CW by checking the checkbox under your answer);
Write them like
## Topic <br><br&...
15
votes
4answers
418 views
What's going on with the Russian etymology questions?
Recently there's been a spate of questions asking about Russian etymologies. Each question seems to come from a new user who never posts again, but all the questions are basically in the same format.
...
14
votes
0answers
324 views
Congratulations, you're no longer in Beta!
This site started private beta before July 2012, so it is no longer "beta", it is a full site by our definition. We've removed the word "beta" from your site banner because we believe that you aren't ...
13
votes
4answers
152 views
Are questions about a single language on topic?
It was suggested at this question that a question about a single language is off-topic, being more appropriate for a Stack Exchange site dedicated to that language. What do people think of this idea?