@BenKovitz reformation could be added as an era/movement, but I'd probably still keep luther or martin-luther, as hopefully we'll have many questions about his writings before long.
Short version: always at least one broad and one narrow. Narrow tags especially help the "related questions" engine provide relevant results.
I know you'd hate to see it ;), but one day I hope we have dozens of questions on the Latin of Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and others, and these tags will be useful for navigation and showing related questions
@C.M.Weimer Don't get me wrong; I'm flexible on this too. Just because it works on the sites I am familiar with doesn't mean it's best for this site. martin-luther definitely makes more sense on Christianity than on Latin.
But I think we'd benefit from getting specific with our tags, perhaps eventually even tagging individual works of Cicero rather than just cicero. I doubt we'd ever get to that level with some of the post-classical guys.
I think "martin-luther" (sorry, don't know how to give it the tag box) is absolutely necessary, lest people use "luther" to tag questions about Luther Vandross's Latin.
"I'm working on an elocution piece and I'd like to know how to pronounce this. Wikipedia says blah blah blah, but I'm having trouble understanding la, la, la, la, la."
My vote is to tell OP to come back once s/he has done some research and then close the question.
I'm having visions of spending the rest of my life (or, more properly, @C.M.Weimer, @Cerberus, @chirlu, et al. spending the rest of their lives) editing questions from lazy people to make them less lazy.
Ah, I didn't realize site-custom reasons were a thing. Close for "lack of demonstrated attempts to find answer" or something.
(Wow. I'm usually an overgenerous person by far, but put me in a chat room and see what happens....)
@JoelDerfner You can make up your own right now on an ad hoc basis, but in the future we'll be able to write ones that are site-specific, like ELU's "please include the research you've done"
In fact, in my answer I have something like, "So, to take your example of limitare/delimitare," which used to be in the question, but now s/he's taken it out of the question and just made it a new question.
@C.M.Weimer I think they're okay, but perhaps not worthy of upvotes. They are specific and they are distinct. To me there's nothing really closeable about an uninteresting question, so votes are the way to go.
It's not so much in my opinion that they're uninteresting, but they all can be answered exactly the same - prefixes are in fact often redundant. That's especially symptomatic of later Latin tendencies, but it's even seen in Classical.
@C.M.Weimer If that's the case, and there really isn't anything unique about these individual cases, then I could be persuaded to go the duplicate route.
@Cerberus It's a good close reason there, because of the vast amounts of sheer ineptitude that come through the door. I don't think it's often adopted at other language sites though, because they don't have quite as much ineptitude, and they are more accommodating to language learners (ELU is specifically not).
Also, mediocre answers will get upvoted if they're posted early, while very thorough and well-researched answers posted late largely get passed over, even if they're the accepted answer ahemcoughcough
Well with babies we often say 'to sleep(/be) in the bed with'. As in "our baby sleeps in the bed with us."
This extends to adults. Warning... NOTE the use of THE, 'in the bed' is different than 'in bed'!!! Compare 'I was in bed with him' and 'I was in the bed with him'.
Would any of the followi...
There is nothing wrong with this answer, but I definitely would not say it is one of the "best" answers on English.SE.
@QPaysTaxes Sure. Short version for me is, if you put something like this on the main site, even with community wiki, it sets precedent for all sorts of resource recommendation questions. If it's closed, then no one can add anything else. If it's locked, no one can vote, defeating the purpose.
@Nathaniel Hah! Nice. I don't think a better answer can be reasonably expected, and yet I find it hard to call it "one of the best answers on the site", because...the question is basically not very interesting, and the most appropriate answer to such a question is usually not very interesting either. That's probably also what you meant, isn't it?
@Cerberus Exactly. I have no clue how it ended up being on the hot network questions list for a week, but I rep capped on four consecutive days thanks to that answer. Absurd.
@QPaysTaxes Okay, how about this. "Thomas sleeps in bed with me." Suppose you heard this in the underground, without context. Then later, the same person said, "Thomas is now 2 months old". Would you be very surprised? Or do you agree that "x sleeps in bed with me" is neutral enough that it can indicate any kind of bed-sharing, sexual or no?
So my position is that the score of an answer works fairly well to differentiate between better and worse answers to the same question; but that a high absolute score does not work well to indicate an very interesting or worthy or whatever answer. The reason is obviously that the absolute score of an answer depends heavily on the score of the question.
@QPaysTaxes Good example.
@QPaysTaxes Hah, nuance!
@QPaysTaxes I think it is more of a multiplication: answer score = popularity of question x how appropriate an answer it is to the question x how interesting it is per se.
Good night!
@QPaysTaxes I didn't mean to say your phrasing was wrong, but I'd like to move the emphasis a little bit to the other factors.
@QPaysTaxes Oh, sorry, I thought your earlier thing about stealing to use on Latin :D was referring to another site I'm on, but it was just an emoticon.
(I spent a summer in Berlin some years ago studying German, and because of all the Bach and Schubert I'd sung I was able to fake my way through the placement test and get put in an intermediate level. But then for the first two weeks I could only say things in this very, very archaic language: "Kind sir, hast thou a pencil?"
You are probably one of the best-qualified people here to ask tough questions, so go for it. There's no harm if they sit unanswered, and maybe they'll draw new experts out of the woodwork.
I've been working on the etymology of Falacer for a while. No real progress was made. I have questions about Roman religion still, but the answers are found, if at all, in papers I hear at conferences. I'm very much interested in the role of the Tiber in Roman economic travel, but that's more for history.se than here, I would imagine.
