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  • (200 questions)

    Puzzles that crucially depend on some feature of the English language or that only work in an English formulation.

  • (131 questions)

    A puzzle that heavily depends on linguistic features; for instance it may concern foreign languages, or only work in some particular language, or be built around a peculiarity of the English language.

Having read the tag wiki excerpts and looked at how these tags are being used ... I don't get it. It seems as though should be a strict subset of , but there are many questions not tagged language, and many English-specific questions not tagged .

Should we clarify, update, or change our usage guidance for these tags?

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1 Answer 1

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We should merge the two tags into one.

Looking at the list of questions for each tag, there doesn't seem to be much difference in how they're actually used.

  • One possibility would be to synonymise and merge into . After all, every puzzle which is essentially about the English language is therefore about language.

  • Another would be to merge into (after all, this is a predominantly English-language site) and then create a new tag1 for those few questions which are language-based but not specifically based on English.


1 This tag could also be called e.g. , or even provided we write a new tag wiki to make clear it's only for non-English languages.

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    $\begingroup$ I think that for many puzzles, tagging it foreign-languages rather than just languages would give part of it away. I do agree with the rest of the post, though $\endgroup$
    – TrojanByAccident
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 14:15
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    $\begingroup$ @Trojan Well, the same is true of almost any tag here: adding a tag can often act as a hint. That's what enigmatic-puzzle is for. $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 14:30
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    $\begingroup$ indeed. The first suggestion still seems better to me, though :P $\endgroup$
    – TrojanByAccident
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 14:36
  • $\begingroup$ I don't know about others, but I think the term "foreign language" is mildly offensive. To someone whose native language is not English, their native language certainly isn't foreign. Perhaps "non-English" or "other languages" might be better choices. $\endgroup$
    – GentlePurpleRain Mod
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 15:52
  • $\begingroup$ @Gentle For better or worse, the official language of this site is English. $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 15:53
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    $\begingroup$ @randal'thor I'm not arguing that; I think it's appropriate to tag non-English-based puzzles with their own tag. I just don't like the term "foreign" when describing non-English languages, since many of them are not in fact foreign to many of our users. $\endgroup$
    – GentlePurpleRain Mod
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 15:56
  • $\begingroup$ Merging language into English removes the ability to categorize non-English puzzles, of which there have been a reasonable number. $\endgroup$
    – user20
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 16:05
  • $\begingroup$ @Emrakul So make a list of the non-English puzzles first, do the merge, and then retag those puzzles manually by referring to the list. (Like I did here, for instance. I have a lot of experience with retagging and merges! :-) ) $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 16:11
  • $\begingroup$ @rand What would we be retagging them to, at that point? Presumably [language], or some other kind of language catch-all tag... $\endgroup$
    – user20
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 17:05
  • $\begingroup$ @Emrakul Yes, I guess [language] or [foreign-languages] or maybe [non-english] as GPR suggested. $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Jan 13, 2017 at 17:11

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