Post History

I am active on the Linguistics Stack Exchange but would really like to leave there completely. I see this site as a potential alternative, but haven't become active here yet. So in a way you could say I am one of those people that are you are trying to get a hold on :) Here are some observations.

### Etymology questions

Whenever I visit I see a lot of questions in the [etymology tag](https://languages.codidact.com/categories/36/tags/3272). Often these questions give just one example of a word that shifted meaning (rather than a couple of words that follow the same pattern), though there are exceptions (https://languages.codidact.com/posts/281087). This doesn't look good:

- They look highly similar. Right now there is a number of questions that are all framed almost exactly the same: "How did word X shift to mean Y?" I would welcome some variety.
- If we take [one](https://languages.codidact.com/posts/283613) as an example, it looks like the poster has done very little work to attempt to get to an answer themselves. The concepts of _seeing_ and _knowledge_ are related in many languages. In English: "I **see** what you mean now"; "let's **look** into this"; etc.
- It is well-known that words change meaning continuously. So really what I wrote in the previous bullet point is all you need to write an answer: show that the concepts are related more frequently, and optionally explain at a cognitive level why: because humans gain knowledge through sight. Now, I might be tempted to write one answer like that and explain a little bit about these kind of cognitive processes, but I'm not going to write 10 answers to what is essentially the same question.

Note that etymology questions [have been a nuisance for others as well](https://languages.codidact.com/posts/279346). It would help a lot if we were able to [ignore tags](https://meta.codidact.com/posts/284720) somehow, although this doesn't help with the first impression of course.

Perhaps it is an idea to expand the [online etymology resources](https://languages.codidact.com/posts/277332) post with information about sites like Wiktionary and also some guidance and examples for people to help them answer their own etymology questions. Then I would suggest we can close most of the etymology questions with reference to that page, and are left with those questions where the poster has put in more work and has a more specific question.

### "Languages", not "Linguistics"(?), and events

There are very few general linguistic questions. Questions of the type:

- How do I draw a syntax tree for ditransitive verbs?
- How is passivization accounted for in Davidsonian formal semantics?
- Is there a useful cross-linguistic definition for the category of adverbs?
- Do consonants tend to be more stable historically than vowels?
- How does recursion work in highly agglutinative languages?
- Is there a universal list of semantic roles like Agent, Patient, Instrument, ...?

It has just been my assumption that there is no point in asking questions of this type since there is no relevant expertise. But maybe this assumption is wrong.

Maybe it's an idea to organize (bi)weekly or monthly events to promote a certain subfield and encourage everyone to ask (and answer) questions from that field, even if the question did not naturally arise? For instance, January could be promoted as Phonology Month. This could be announced in a meta post, which also collects all relevant questions, and those questions are invited to add a small link at the bottom to the event as well (for visibility). In an event like this, someone may be more inclined to write up a question they wouldn't post otherwise because there may not be enough expertise.

### Advertising: LINGUIST list

If you want to reach professional linguists, the best way is to send in an item to the [LINGUIST List](https://linguistlist.org/). This is a high-volume newsletter announcing books, reviews, conference calls, jobs, and more.

In all honesty, I think advertising there now would not give a good impression, because of all those etymology questions. [Japanese pronouns](https://languages.codidact.com/posts/279311) is an example of the type of question that might be interesting to this audience: it looks at one particular language, but frames it in a wider discussion. And of course there are fine language-specific questions that some will find interesting (e.g. [רכב vs. אוטו](https://languages.codidact.com/posts/277278)), if they are familiar with the language. The absolute and relative number of questions like this will have to be much higher before I can recommend this site to my colleagues, or before it will be useful to advertise on the LINGUIST List. (I may already recommend it to students of some languages, like Modern Hebrew and Spanish, that seem to be well-represented here.)

### Design

This is not site-specific, but I would suggest removing the vote counts, or at least reduce their size, in question lists. I think the red/green meter looks great, and I don't need to know the exact vote counts on the front page. See [current page](https://languages.codidact.com/uploads/1BAm1dYpc69sNFNdf7ufQdgF); [mockup with small font](https://languages.codidact.com/uploads/1DvyJzMToEgKgvwvhbVDhegX); [mockup without vote counts](https://languages.codidact.com/uploads/SEMe9FYqPPch1YHYUV1iij6y).