On other Stack Exchange language sites, tags and tag wikis are in the language the site uses. French Language, for example, names their tags in French. Currently, Latin Language Stack Exchange has tags in English.
Should we rename our tags to Latin? For example, should etymology because etymologiam, or some such form of the word?
I (grudgingly) admit that in the long run Latin tags will be a better option than English. But I'm concerned that saying "Latin tags only" is going to hamstring our efforts to fully tag the questions that we get.
To put it simply: We are going to need a lot more tags than the ones we have now. And if we say, "no new English tags," then many people won't be able to fully participate in that effort.
I'm more comfortable if we understand that the end goal is that all tags be in Latin, with English synonyms, but that we will achieve that goal through the combined efforts of those less comfortable with Latin (what's the Latin for enclitic, anyway?) who create tags in English, and those more comfortable with Latin, who kindly retag with the Latin version and synonymize.
And yes, we need synonyms. Lots and lots of them.
I was initially against this (from a not-fluent student point of view), but now I think it might be a good idea. Changing our tags to be Latin would fall in nicely with the full immersion approach that is recommended by SE staff. I think it'd help folks like me learn the language.
However, as a student, I'd want liberal (ab)use of synonyms. For your example above, we should make a etymology -> etymologiam synonym. This would let me type english-tag into the tag box and get obscure-latin-tag-that-means-the-same-thing instead.
We'd need people proactively suggesting/creating these, and staff or moderators (when we get our own) approving them. Do we have the resources to do that yet? I'm not sure, but if we're going to do this it'd be best to do it in private beta.
I think naming the tags in Latin is a great idea! It's an easy, convenient way to pick up a little more Latin by using it rather than just talking about it.
Happily, people just starting Latin don't need to know what the tag words mean, because more-experienced users can add and edit the tags on questions. Experienced users on most StackExchanges normally do most of the tagging.
However, there is one difficulty: when first-time users post a first question, they may be perplexed and put off by the need to supply a tag. Any ideas for a solution? Can we have the software suggest a tag? I probably shouldn't suggest grammatica, but the English version of that enabled me to get started with my first question.
I don't think this is a good idea. It works for other languages because the primary purpose of those languages is current communication in those languages. The primary purpose of Latin and other dead languages is instead to understand written texts.
Given that this is an English site and that the people who primarily come here know English, I can see zero benefit is making the tags Latin. In fact, despite Ben Kovitz' idea of mods tagging posts, one of the main purposes of tags is to allow users to explore efficiently. That purpose is wholly defeated if we resort to esoteric language and possibly made up words for which the ancient Romans had nothing comparable.
Editing this to incorporate Earthliŋ's comments, which I wholeheartedly agree with. I think this would make an excellent compromise:
Something that we did on Japanese.SE is to use English tags, but give a Japanese translation right at the beginning of the tag excerpt (picture). This way the tags are easier to type and recognize, but hovering over them reveals the translation straight away. We could decide whether we want to include pseudo-Latin translations for modern words, but at least they won't feature as strongly and we would have the most useful/widely-known terminology on the tag itself. This might be a "best of both worlds"...?
Edited again just to keep the conversation going. Can someone chime in, one way or another?
