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I saw both and come up when writing a question, and I couldn't figure out what difference there would be using one or the other, considering that we specify that questions concerning Greek must be about the time period "late antiquity or older" to be in scope.

Should the latter tag be made a synonym of the former ( automatically is remapped to )?

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  • Hmm I am torn between the two answers. Each gives a good argument. But I certainly favour a merger of the two tags.
    – Cerberus Mod
    Mar 9, 2021 at 2:13
  • See my latest comment under the top answer.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Mar 11, 2021 at 10:21

2 Answers 2

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I would be in favor of merging the two into one ancient-greek tag. This way it is clear that modern Greek is squarely off limits. While there may not be any confusion now over the topic, leaving it without a modifier leaves it open to questions in later down the road. Changing it now will make when there are relatively so few questions means that we are saving ourselves time in case there ever is a need to change it later. It's future-proofing.

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    I prefer this merge since the tag koine-greek also exists, and if there is also a tag greek, the two tags would be used redundantly alongside each other, since all Koine Greek is Greek as well (and indeed most koine-greek questions existing now are also tagged with greek). And the need for a separate modern-greek tag might arise later, just like modern languages such as english or spanish have their own tags.
    – b a
    Mar 10, 2021 at 0:01
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    @ba Is Koine Greek a subset of Ancient Greek or would the two be separate? It's perfectly fine to have "subtags", but I'm not sure whether this would be one. // I agree that we might want to have a tag for Modern Greek too, just like for Spanish. I don't think it will cause much moderation trouble.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Mar 10, 2021 at 7:41
  • @JoonasIlmavirta I personally don't have an opinion either way, but if it were to be a subset and not defined separately, i.e. if the two tags are intended to be used in conjunction, that would negate my first point.
    – b a
    Mar 10, 2021 at 11:40
  • I synonymized the two tags with ancient-greek as the main tag and greek as the subordinate one. If we want to reverse the direction, that can be done easily, but this direction seems more popular and the support for combining the two tags in some way is clear. If no complaints arise, I will merge the tags after a while. (Remind me if I seem to have forgotten!) All tag synonyms are listed here.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Mar 11, 2021 at 10:20
  • @JoonasIlmavirta See esp. Rafael's comment to Draconis' post.
    – cmw Mod
    Mar 11, 2021 at 13:59
  • @C.M.Weimer If we merge the two tags, a user can still type in "greek" as tag name, and it will be automatically converted to "ancient-greek". Not all users, especially novices, will notice such a conversion or care about it. If we want to actually disallow the tag "greek" requiring them to choose something more specific, we need to blacklist "greek". If we go that route, I'd blacklist the plain "translation" too. (I'm not sure where to post this, so I'll leave another comment under the other answer.)
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Mar 11, 2021 at 14:10
  • If we want blacklisting (now we have blacklisted "latin" and "grammar", I think), it might be worth a separate meta discussion. It's a very extreme form of tag management.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Mar 11, 2021 at 14:11
  • @JoonasIlmavirta I would be in favor of blacklisting Greek and adding a Modern Greek tag, but I can see how that's a long term solution in search of a problem. Maybe keep it this way for now and cross the Modern Greek bridge if we ever get there.
    – cmw Mod
    Mar 11, 2021 at 16:19
  • @C.M.Weimer Sounds reasonable. I think the best way to introduce a Modern Greek tag is to ask a good question about the topic (even an artificial one, just for the sake of giving an example) and adding the tag to it. Some kind of comparison of a feature between different eras of Greek might work.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Mar 11, 2021 at 17:41
  • @JoonasIlmavirta latin.stackexchange.com/questions/15582/…
    – cmw Mod
    Mar 17, 2021 at 6:08
  • @C.M.Weimer That's a good one. I added a new tag to it and wrote up a description. Feel free to make any edits.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Mar 17, 2021 at 12:30
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I would prefer to merge the two into greek. It's by far the more popular tag (417 questions compared to 17), it's more concise and elegant, and as far as I'm aware we haven't been seeing much confusion about whether Modern Greek is in scope.

EDIT: The issue of koine-greek was brought up in the comments; I see no issue with koine-greek and greek being applied to the same question, much like how a question can be tagged with both old-latin and plautus.

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    The issue of greek by itself is that it would be the go-to choice for someone taking about modern Greek (as in, say, [modern] Greek words of Latin origin). Typing 'greek' and having to choose between classical, koine and moder could help a bit.
    – Rafael
    Mar 10, 2021 at 17:33
  • @Rafael and Draconis: See the comments under the other question. Synonymizing or even merging does not disallow "greek" as a tag name, it just replaces it automatically. I agree that modern Greek has caused essentially no trouble so far, but I do favor requiring (in a soft or hard way) more specificity.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta Mod
    Mar 11, 2021 at 14:14

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