@Tsundoku much much later, I've moved the comment from the question to a proper comment under your answer

@Randal'Thor feel free to edit the new OE-lit tag onto my topic challenge Qs

@bobble I was never quite sure about that tag, and the meta discussion way back wasn't very conclusive. But looking at Old English literature makes it pretty clear that it's a different language from modern English, not mutually intelligible, therefore should be worth a separate tag.

As for where to draw the line, and whether Middle English deserves a tag too, we can kick that can down the road.

My main concern is that the tag name makes it very liable to be misused: new users might put it on any question about classics written in English.

> Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language

Could we call it anglo-saxon-literature instead, and have old-english-literature as a synonym?

I think that'd be better, yes.

@Randal'Thor My understanding has always been that Old English is essentially a different language because 1066 was such a watershed moment, not just politically but also linguistically. I am not aware of a similar "watershed" that would separate Middle English from (Early) Modern English.

So for now, I would argue against a tag for Middle English.

@Randal'Thor Since Old English is the more common term in linguistics (at least to my knowledge), I would treat old-english-literature as the main tag.

@Tsundoku Remember that that tag will appear whenever anyone types "english" into the tag box, and someone who doesn't know our language tag policies may think it means "old (English literature)" rather than "(Old English) literature", hence should apply to questions about Shakespeare or Austen or whatever they see as "old".

@Randal'Thor can we call it ænglisc? that's even harder to misunderstand than those

or ænglisc-literature if you wish, though I'm not sure why we need "-literature" in tags on the Literature site

@Randal'Thor Wouldn't that happen with a synonym, too?

@NapoleonWilson Yes, but at least if someone sees anglo-saxon-literature as the name of the tag, they're less likely to think it applies to books from the last few centuries.

True.

upper-saxon-literature