I would put learning posts into their relevant groups: if you want to learn about languages, you go to ~humanities.linguistics; if you want to learn about programming, you go to ~comp.programming;...
I don't think learning really fits into any existing category
I would put learning posts into their relevant groups: if you want to learn about languages, you go to ~humanities.linguistics; if you want to learn about programming, you go to ~comp.programming; if you want to learn about painting, you go to ~creative.visualarts; and so on.
A bit of a rehashing of what I wrote in another comment, but again: mixing in together discussion about learning a thing and more professional discussion about that thing is not a good idea. If...
Exemplary
A bit of a rehashing of what I wrote in another comment, but again: mixing in together discussion about learning a thing and more professional discussion about that thing is not a good idea. If anything, it'll drive away the more accomplished users because they don't have much interest in learning anymore, and learning material will always outweigh more professional material.
I am completely new to tildes but as far as I understand it topics can be tagged and then filtered by tag. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to leave learning posts in the group itself but tag them...
I am completely new to tildes but as far as I understand it topics can be tagged and then filtered by tag. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to leave learning posts in the group itself but tag them appropriately so people who do not want to see them can filter them out?
Welcome to Tildes! I think there are a bit of a blurred line between a tag and a subgroup. If a tag is used / would be used often enough that it has or potentially could have it's own community...
Welcome to Tildes!
I think there are a bit of a blurred line between a tag and a subgroup. If a tag is used / would be used often enough that it has or potentially could have it's own community around it, IMHO it should become it's own group. Tags have the downside of being totally conventional and optional.
But my opinion is that learning about a topic and discussion of knowledgeable people on a similar or identical topic do merit separate places because the interference of the two spheres may cause problems.
I totally agree. We’ve seen many times that professionals do not enjoy half of their group being taken up by brand new people who constantly need help and answers to questions that every beginner...
I totally agree. We’ve seen many times that professionals do not enjoy half of their group being taken up by brand new people who constantly need help and answers to questions that every beginner will eventually encounter.
Some professionals like teaching people and handling these identical scenarios over and over to help new learners grow, but most professionals would rather focus on the unique and complicated topics that come with skill and time.
I would like to respectfully disagree. Linguistics is a science, while language learning (and learning stuff about languages without studying them, aka being a linguaphile) is closer to a hobby....
I would like to respectfully disagree. Linguistics is a science, while language learning (and learning stuff about languages without studying them, aka being a linguaphile) is closer to a hobby. Just like you wouldn't want gardening advice discussed in ~science.biology, you wouldn't want “Duolingo vs Memrise” topics in ~humanities.linguistics, which would probably be more of a “Chomsky vs Sapir-Whorf” place.
I think of a "linguistics" group as a bucket for all language-related content. I wouldn't separate it into language-for-academics and language-for-laypeople. That seems like an artificial and...
I think of a "linguistics" group as a bucket for all language-related content. I wouldn't separate it into language-for-academics and language-for-laypeople. That seems like an artificial and unnecessary division to me.
Linguistics - the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics. Specific branches of linguistics include sociolinguistics,...
Linguistics - the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics. Specific branches of linguistics include sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, historical-comparative linguistics, and applied linguistics.
Learning a language for conversation has very little to do with linguistics.
cc @Algernon_Asimov While I disagree with this---linguistics does study teaching & learning languages in various ways, not limited at all to native acquisition---, I do agree that mixing practical...
Learning a language for conversation has very little to do with linguistics.
While I disagree with this---linguistics does study teaching & learning languages in various ways, not limited at all to native acquisition---, I do agree that mixing practical questions about language learning and linguistics would quickly dilute the linguistics part of it b/c language learning questions would override more directly linguistics related stuff, involving language learning or not. I'm all for the separation of science & practical questions (like "do you know a playlist of old european portuguese movies on youtube" doesn't really fit in linguistics).
I think you've misunderstood what I've said. I didn't say that linguistics has little to do with how people learn a language, I said that learning a language has little to do with linguistics. To...
linguistics does study teaching & learning languages in various ways, not limited at all to native acquisition
I think you've misunderstood what I've said. I didn't say that linguistics has little to do with how people learn a language, I said that learning a language has little to do with linguistics. To be more clear, if you are learning a language, you are not partaking in the science of linguistics; if you use Duolingo to learn a language, you're not studying linguistics, but the makers of Duolingo certainly include linguists.
I also didn't say that learning a language has nothing to do with linguistics - there is clearly some relationship - but that classifying learning a new language as linguistics is incorrect.
No apology necessary! I strive and struggle to be concise, but I relish expounding on a topic, so I appreciate the opportunity to do so. I also struggle with terseness; I am often so to the point...
No apology necessary! I strive and struggle to be concise, but I relish expounding on a topic, so I appreciate the opportunity to do so.
I also struggle with terseness; I am often so to the point of being rude, for which I apologize. To be clear -
"I think you've misunderstood what I've said," could or should be replaced with "That's not precisely what I meant," to be a lot more fair to you in the conversation.
No problem! A conversation is nothing but first misunderstanding each other and then fixing that misunderstanding iteratively, anyways :) I don't think your comment was rude or too terse, TBH I...
No problem! A conversation is nothing but first misunderstanding each other and then fixing that misunderstanding iteratively, anyways :)
I don't think your comment was rude or too terse, TBH I might have read a bit too superficially. Cheers!
Quite a few people (@iiv @cadadr @ainar-g) are getting hung up on the literal definition of "linguistics". It's just a tag for a category of posts in ~humanities, which I hope will eventually be...
Quite a few people (@iiv@cadadr@ainar-g) are getting hung up on the literal definition of "linguistics". It's just a tag for a category of posts in ~humanities, which I hope will eventually be created as a sub-group there. However, it appears I may have stuffed up in my choice of word for this (ironically!).
Six months ago, Deimos asked for suggestions for new groups here on Tildes. At the time, some of the less science-oriented subjects such as religion, history, and language, were being overlooked on this heavily tech-leaning website. The few posts we were getting about these subjects back then were mostly being posted in ~talk and ~misc. I wanted to give these subjects some prominence by having a group specifically for them (having formerly been a moderator of a history-themed subreddit myself).
However, I knew I wasn't going to get multiple groups for these. It was clear that Deimos wanted to add only a very few groups at that time. So, rather than ask for a separate group for language, and for religion, and for history (each of which deserves their own group on Tildes!), I figured it was easier and more achievable to ask for one all-inclusive group for these topics. I chose the name of this catch-all group from the official academic name for these subjects collectively: humanities.
I always intended that this group would eventually break into sub-groups for language, religion, philosophy, and history (I consider the arts to be covered adequately by ~creative, ~books, ~music, ~movies, and ~tv). I decided to pre-emptively label these sub-groups by their academic titles (in keeping with the academic name I chose for the main group): linguistics, theology, philosophy, and history. I've therefore been using these tags for posts in ~humanities. That appears to have been a mistake.
You'll notice that my posts under the "linguistics" include formal studies about the study of language and informal articles about everyday language matters. That tag and its proposed future sub-group are not supposed to be exclusively for academic studies; they're supposed to include all matters related to language.
Would people prefer it if I used the less formal versions for those tags, such as "language" and "religion"? Would that make it clearer what I've been trying to achieve?
Thanks for the backstory! Personally, my perception of ~humanities and ~science is more "academic oriented", i.e. either scholarly stuff, or divulgation & discussion thereof. I would not expect a...
Thanks for the backstory!
Personally, my perception of ~humanities and ~science is more "academic oriented", i.e. either scholarly stuff, or divulgation & discussion thereof. I would not expect a language learning community to appear under ~humanities. But that might be because of me missing the history you cite in your comment. Nevertheless, I find that approach rather confusing TBH.
IMHO a separate ~learn tree of groups could help distinguish between strictly learning-help related activity and actual discussion in various groups like comp, humanities & science, which I find is potentially beneficial, especially as the levels of activity increases.
WRT tagging, well, an article like "21 untranslatable words" or "Grammar nazis put people off" would be better tagged 'language' rather than 'linguistics' because that has nothing to do with linguistics study. Overloading say linguistics to include all everything that has to do with language is confusing IMO.
Thank you for the feedback! So, in short, you would prefer that I use "language" tags in ~humanities, instead of "linguistics" tags. I'm happy to change this if that's the feedback I get from...
Thank you for the feedback!
So, in short, you would prefer that I use "language" tags in ~humanities, instead of "linguistics" tags. I'm happy to change this if that's the feedback I get from enough people. I'm not committed to "linguistics": I'll dump it tomorrow if people relate better to "language". I'll even do the work to retrospectively fix all the tags on old posts.
With regard to my choice of the name "humanities" for this top-level group... what would you have done instead? Given that we were not going to get a separate group for language and religion and history, how would you have approached this? What name would you have chosen for this group? Would you have even asked for one umbrella group at all, or taken a different approach?
I must clarify that my intention with ~humanities was never to make it an academic group. The name "humanities" was just the only label I could find that included all these subjects (language, religion, history, and so on). If you have a better name for this group, we might be able to beg Deimos to change it (or not - no guarantees!).
With regard specifically to the subject of language, I expect there to be a top-level sub-group called ~humanities.linguistics or ~humanities.language (take your pick!), under which all topics related to language would appear. It might develop a number of sub-sub-groups, such as:
I'm hoping to build a ~humanities.language which will be a top-level group for all language-related matters, with a tree of sub-groups for the various things people will want to see and discuss about language.
I honestly don't understand why you think that learning about language (or any other topic) should be separated from the main "language" (or any other topic) group? What's the benefit in separating one type of language-related posts from all the other language-related posts? What would be the problem in having a one-stop shop for all language-related matters?
To me, it seems like a positive benefit to have a sub-group for learning about languages in the same place as all other language-related sub-groups: if I'm trying to learn a language, I'll naturally be interested in reading about language and languages, and I'll see these general posts as well as learning-specific posts.
I'm not mother tongue English, so I might just be lacking the knowledge of a wider meaning of the term "humanities" (sorry if that's the case). Or maybe I'm being pedantic, which I sometimes am...
With regard to my choice of the name "humanities" for this top-level group... what would you have done instead? Given that we were not going to get a separate group for language and religion and history, how would you have approached this? What name would you have chosen for this group? Would you have even asked for one umbrella group at all, or taken a different approach?
I must clarify that my intention with ~humanities was never to make it an academic group. The name "humanities" was just the only label I could find that included all these subjects (language, religion, history, and so on). If you have a better name for this group, we might be able to beg Deimos to change it (or not - no guarantees!).
I'm not mother tongue English, so I might just be lacking the knowledge of a wider meaning of the term "humanities" (sorry if that's the case). Or maybe I'm being pedantic, which I sometimes am unfortunately. Maybe ~society? I think ~humanities is better than that tho.
With regard specifically to the subject of language, I expect there to be a top-level sub-group called ~humanities.linguistics or ~humanities.language (take your pick!), under which all topics related to language would appear. It might develop a number of sub-sub-groups, such as:
Having separate subgroups for languages wouldn't really be productive b/c what is and what is not a language is a problematic topic, and even the least inclusive list needs to include thousands of languages. Better to leave it to tags instead. Just like with countries.
To me, it seems like a positive benefit to have a sub-group for learning about languages in the same place as all other language-related sub-groups: if I'm trying to learn a language, I'll naturally be interested in reading about language and languages, and I'll see these general posts as well as learning-specific posts.
Totally agree, the keyword being a "subgroup": I do think that learners and the already-learned should constitute two intersecting communities, even if the intersection is quite large. I think there is a divide between the kind of discussion they have, at least for some areas like CS or language learning. The actual topology of the grouping is not really important IMHO, just the ability to focus on the community one needs.
Thanks for clarifying the intent. Yes, I think so. With that said, I still think that more formal submissions should probably go to ~science under the linguistics tag, but that's just my opinion.
Thanks for clarifying the intent.
Would people prefer it if I used the less formal versions for those tags, such as "language" and "religion"? Would that make it clearer what I've been trying to achieve?
Yes, I think so. With that said, I still think that more formal submissions should probably go to ~science under the linguistics tag, but that's just my opinion.
Cool. You're the second person, after @cadadr, to give that feedback. I'll work on changing those tags on past and future posts in ~humanities, so that it makes more sense to everyone. Why? Why...
Yes, I think so.
Cool. You're the second person, after @cadadr, to give that feedback. I'll work on changing those tags on past and future posts in ~humanities, so that it makes more sense to everyone.
With that said, I still think that more formal submissions should probably go to ~science under the linguistics tag,
Why? Why should some posts about language go to ~science and some posts about language go to ~humanities? Why split a single subject ("language") across two groups?
Remember that we will eventually have more sub-groups and sub-sub-groups. We're just building the foundations for now. Would it make sense to have a future sub-group like ~humanities.language.linguistics for more formal posts about language?
Honestly, I don't think this argument is even relevant at the moment. There just aren't enough people, so your argument regarding the split may apply. ~humanities.language.linguistics sounds like...
Honestly, I don't think this argument is even relevant at the moment. There just aren't enough people, so your argument regarding the split may apply. ~humanities.language.linguistics sounds like a good enough solution for the moment.
I wouldn't support that, but a possible rarionale is linguistics crosses path quite more often with quantitaive sciences than almost all of the other humanities disciplines.
Why? Why should some posts about language go to ~science and some posts about language go to ~humanities? Why split a single subject ("language") across two groups?
I wouldn't support that, but a possible rarionale is linguistics crosses path quite more often with quantitaive sciences than almost all of the other humanities disciplines.
I would say this is part of ~humanities.linguistics. That is one of the sub-groups I'm seeding there. If you want to share language resources, or find language resources, that would be a logical...
I would say this is part of ~humanities.linguistics. That is one of the sub-groups I'm seeding there. If you want to share language resources, or find language resources, that would be a logical place to host them.
It'll probably be under ~hobbies.languages. But yeah, that would be neat.
Maybe a separate tilde ~learn? I don't think learning really fits into any existing category
I would put learning posts into their relevant groups: if you want to learn about languages, you go to ~humanities.linguistics; if you want to learn about programming, you go to ~comp.programming; if you want to learn about painting, you go to ~creative.visualarts; and so on.
A bit of a rehashing of what I wrote in another comment, but again: mixing in together discussion about learning a thing and more professional discussion about that thing is not a good idea. If anything, it'll drive away the more accomplished users because they don't have much interest in learning anymore, and learning material will always outweigh more professional material.
~humanities.linguistics.langlearn (and similarly ~comp.programming.learncoding, ~creative.visualarts.learn, etc.) could be better, but I'm all for having a separate space for learning-related stuff under ~learn, like @JustABanana suggests. It'd improve the quality and experience for both kinds of users and anyone it between.
I am completely new to tildes but as far as I understand it topics can be tagged and then filtered by tag. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to leave learning posts in the group itself but tag them appropriately so people who do not want to see them can filter them out?
Welcome to Tildes!
I think there are a bit of a blurred line between a tag and a subgroup. If a tag is used / would be used often enough that it has or potentially could have it's own community around it, IMHO it should become it's own group. Tags have the downside of being totally conventional and optional.
But my opinion is that learning about a topic and discussion of knowledgeable people on a similar or identical topic do merit separate places because the interference of the two spheres may cause problems.
I totally agree. We’ve seen many times that professionals do not enjoy half of their group being taken up by brand new people who constantly need help and answers to questions that every beginner will eventually encounter.
Some professionals like teaching people and handling these identical scenarios over and over to help new learners grow, but most professionals would rather focus on the unique and complicated topics that come with skill and time.
I think it would be under ~humanities.linguistics.
I would like to respectfully disagree. Linguistics is a science, while language learning (and learning stuff about languages without studying them, aka being a linguaphile) is closer to a hobby. Just like you wouldn't want gardening advice discussed in ~science.biology, you wouldn't want “Duolingo vs Memrise” topics in ~humanities.linguistics, which would probably be more of a “Chomsky vs Sapir-Whorf” place.
I think of a "linguistics" group as a bucket for all language-related content. I wouldn't separate it into language-for-academics and language-for-laypeople. That seems like an artificial and unnecessary division to me.
Linguistics - the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics. Specific branches of linguistics include sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, historical-comparative linguistics, and applied linguistics.
Learning a language for conversation has very little to do with linguistics.
cc @Algernon_Asimov
While I disagree with this---linguistics does study teaching & learning languages in various ways, not limited at all to native acquisition---, I do agree that mixing practical questions about language learning and linguistics would quickly dilute the linguistics part of it b/c language learning questions would override more directly linguistics related stuff, involving language learning or not. I'm all for the separation of science & practical questions (like "do you know a playlist of old european portuguese movies on youtube" doesn't really fit in linguistics).
I think you've misunderstood what I've said. I didn't say that linguistics has little to do with how people learn a language, I said that learning a language has little to do with linguistics. To be more clear, if you are learning a language, you are not partaking in the science of linguistics; if you use Duolingo to learn a language, you're not studying linguistics, but the makers of Duolingo certainly include linguists.
I also didn't say that learning a language has nothing to do with linguistics - there is clearly some relationship - but that classifying learning a new language as linguistics is incorrect.
Sorry for the misunderstanding!
No apology necessary! I strive and struggle to be concise, but I relish expounding on a topic, so I appreciate the opportunity to do so.
I also struggle with terseness; I am often so to the point of being rude, for which I apologize. To be clear -
"I think you've misunderstood what I've said," could or should be replaced with "That's not precisely what I meant," to be a lot more fair to you in the conversation.
No problem! A conversation is nothing but first misunderstanding each other and then fixing that misunderstanding iteratively, anyways :)
I don't think your comment was rude or too terse, TBH I might have read a bit too superficially. Cheers!
Quite a few people (@iiv @cadadr @ainar-g) are getting hung up on the literal definition of "linguistics". It's just a tag for a category of posts in ~humanities, which I hope will eventually be created as a sub-group there. However, it appears I may have stuffed up in my choice of word for this (ironically!).
Six months ago, Deimos asked for suggestions for new groups here on Tildes. At the time, some of the less science-oriented subjects such as religion, history, and language, were being overlooked on this heavily tech-leaning website. The few posts we were getting about these subjects back then were mostly being posted in ~talk and ~misc. I wanted to give these subjects some prominence by having a group specifically for them (having formerly been a moderator of a history-themed subreddit myself).
However, I knew I wasn't going to get multiple groups for these. It was clear that Deimos wanted to add only a very few groups at that time. So, rather than ask for a separate group for language, and for religion, and for history (each of which deserves their own group on Tildes!), I figured it was easier and more achievable to ask for one all-inclusive group for these topics. I chose the name of this catch-all group from the official academic name for these subjects collectively: humanities.
I always intended that this group would eventually break into sub-groups for language, religion, philosophy, and history (I consider the arts to be covered adequately by ~creative, ~books, ~music, ~movies, and ~tv). I decided to pre-emptively label these sub-groups by their academic titles (in keeping with the academic name I chose for the main group): linguistics, theology, philosophy, and history. I've therefore been using these tags for posts in ~humanities. That appears to have been a mistake.
You'll notice that my posts under the "linguistics" include formal studies about the study of language and informal articles about everyday language matters. That tag and its proposed future sub-group are not supposed to be exclusively for academic studies; they're supposed to include all matters related to language.
Would people prefer it if I used the less formal versions for those tags, such as "language" and "religion"? Would that make it clearer what I've been trying to achieve?
Thanks for the backstory!
Personally, my perception of ~humanities and ~science is more "academic oriented", i.e. either scholarly stuff, or divulgation & discussion thereof. I would not expect a language learning community to appear under ~humanities. But that might be because of me missing the history you cite in your comment. Nevertheless, I find that approach rather confusing TBH.
IMHO a separate ~learn tree of groups could help distinguish between strictly learning-help related activity and actual discussion in various groups like comp, humanities & science, which I find is potentially beneficial, especially as the levels of activity increases.
WRT tagging, well, an article like "21 untranslatable words" or "Grammar nazis put people off" would be better tagged 'language' rather than 'linguistics' because that has nothing to do with linguistics study. Overloading say linguistics to include all everything that has to do with language is confusing IMO.
Thank you for the feedback!
So, in short, you would prefer that I use "language" tags in ~humanities, instead of "linguistics" tags. I'm happy to change this if that's the feedback I get from enough people. I'm not committed to "linguistics": I'll dump it tomorrow if people relate better to "language". I'll even do the work to retrospectively fix all the tags on old posts.
With regard to my choice of the name "humanities" for this top-level group... what would you have done instead? Given that we were not going to get a separate group for language and religion and history, how would you have approached this? What name would you have chosen for this group? Would you have even asked for one umbrella group at all, or taken a different approach?
I must clarify that my intention with ~humanities was never to make it an academic group. The name "humanities" was just the only label I could find that included all these subjects (language, religion, history, and so on). If you have a better name for this group, we might be able to beg Deimos to change it (or not - no guarantees!).
With regard specifically to the subject of language, I expect there to be a top-level sub-group called ~humanities.linguistics or ~humanities.language (take your pick!), under which all topics related to language would appear. It might develop a number of sub-sub-groups, such as:
In this approach, the Tildes equivalent to Reddit's /r/AskGrammar might be ~humanities.language.grammar.ask, and the Tildes equivalent to Reddit's /r/ConLangs might be ~humanities.language.constructed.
Or maybe we'd organise it by individual languages:
.... and each of these groups could have a .learn and a .grammar and a .ask sub-group related to it.
I'm hoping to build a ~humanities.language which will be a top-level group for all language-related matters, with a tree of sub-groups for the various things people will want to see and discuss about language.
I honestly don't understand why you think that learning about language (or any other topic) should be separated from the main "language" (or any other topic) group? What's the benefit in separating one type of language-related posts from all the other language-related posts? What would be the problem in having a one-stop shop for all language-related matters?
To me, it seems like a positive benefit to have a sub-group for learning about languages in the same place as all other language-related sub-groups: if I'm trying to learn a language, I'll naturally be interested in reading about language and languages, and I'll see these general posts as well as learning-specific posts.
I'm not mother tongue English, so I might just be lacking the knowledge of a wider meaning of the term "humanities" (sorry if that's the case). Or maybe I'm being pedantic, which I sometimes am unfortunately. Maybe ~society? I think ~humanities is better than that tho.
I think (read: I just brainfarted) that linguistics could be under the hierarchy of ~humanities.language as ~humanities.language.linguistics (with potential sisters like ~humanities.language.learn(ing), ~...philology & ~...philosophy), and that'd clear up quite a bit of the confusion and complexity here. And up until we had such granular groups, we could just do ~humanities + tags, then gradually ~humanities.language + tags, etc.
Having separate subgroups for languages wouldn't really be productive b/c what is and what is not a language is a problematic topic, and even the least inclusive list needs to include thousands of languages. Better to leave it to tags instead. Just like with countries.
Totally agree, the keyword being a "subgroup": I do think that learners and the already-learned should constitute two intersecting communities, even if the intersection is quite large. I think there is a divide between the kind of discussion they have, at least for some areas like CS or language learning. The actual topology of the grouping is not really important IMHO, just the ability to focus on the community one needs.
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities
Thanks for clarifying the intent.
Yes, I think so. With that said, I still think that more formal submissions should probably go to ~science under the linguistics tag, but that's just my opinion.
Cool. You're the second person, after @cadadr, to give that feedback. I'll work on changing those tags on past and future posts in ~humanities, so that it makes more sense to everyone.
Why? Why should some posts about language go to ~science and some posts about language go to ~humanities? Why split a single subject ("language") across two groups?
Remember that we will eventually have more sub-groups and sub-sub-groups. We're just building the foundations for now. Would it make sense to have a future sub-group like ~humanities.language.linguistics for more formal posts about language?
Honestly, I don't think this argument is even relevant at the moment. There just aren't enough people, so your argument regarding the split may apply. ~humanities.language.linguistics sounds like a good enough solution for the moment.
I wouldn't support that, but a possible rarionale is linguistics crosses path quite more often with quantitaive sciences than almost all of the other humanities disciplines.
Might be worth checking out the language learner sites on Stack Exchange
I would say this is part of ~humanities.linguistics. That is one of the sub-groups I'm seeding there. If you want to share language resources, or find language resources, that would be a logical place to host them.
I think so too. But after opening up the registrations. We don't have enough people for any more groups yet.