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Car wrote:We decided to merge several language forums into one because none of them was active enough to warrant a forum of its own. The alternative would have been to have one thread for each of the languages in the "Other languages" forum.
Riptide wrote:Why not have subforums in the SEAL forum for the languages most people are posting about, and then have single topics for the rest in the SEAL forum? That would help with the clutter problem. Also, I think merged topics for these "subforum languages" should be archived.
korn wrote:Car wrote:We decided to merge several language forums into one because none of them was active enough to warrant a forum of its own. The alternative would have been to have one thread for each of the languages in the "Other languages" forum.
I don't understand. Is it possible to reverse the process back? I mean what would happen if each language had a section of it's own? What's the worst thing what would happen? If there is not that much action going on, then it shouldn't be that hard to administrate anyway.]/quote]
We had that before which led to lots of "dead" forums. We're definitely not going back to that. Nowadays, our conditions for new forums are stricter because we had that long enough. It wasn't an easy decision to come up with the current solution.Instead of putting every SEA language into one section you should have find a way to increase user interaction.
Such as?BTW: Sorry for the thread title, but putting unrelated language into one and the same category just shows lack of respect for the languages - like they are all the same and indistinguishable anyway.
No, relatedness isn't the only thing to group languages by. Many users are interested in languages from certain regions as opposed to language families.
[quote}Also, the Vietnamese flag shouldn't represent all SEA languages.
korn wrote:Only the Vietnamese flag is shown for all SEA languages - as if Vietnamese represents all SEA languages?
Car wrote:Such as?
Ariki wrote:I would like to know if there will be a forum restructure where we start grouping languages by language families? Has the capability of technology improved sufficiently enough for this to become a possibility?
vijayjohn wrote:Ariki wrote:I would like to know if there will be a forum restructure where we start grouping languages by language families? Has the capability of technology improved sufficiently enough for this to become a possibility?
I doubt very much that that will happen. From what I can tell, UniLangers generally speak various Indo-European languages (from Europe), but it's otherwise relatively rare that you find someone who speaks more than one language within a particular language family. For example, nobody is actively learning any Dravidian language except Malayalam right now, no one seems to be learning a Tai-Kadai language other than Thai, etc. So if we organized the forum by language families, there would be a very strong skew in activity towards the Indo-European languages and almost nothing going on with a lot of the other language families, and I don't see any way a forum with that organization could be easy to manage. There's also a bit of a problem with accommodating languages whose linguistic affiliation is uncertain and with mixed languages (which rarely, if ever, can be placed in any single language family).
Yasna wrote:vijayjohn wrote:Ariki wrote:I would like to know if there will be a forum restructure where we start grouping languages by language families? Has the capability of technology improved sufficiently enough for this to become a possibility?
I doubt very much that that will happen. From what I can tell, UniLangers generally speak various Indo-European languages (from Europe), but it's otherwise relatively rare that you find someone who speaks more than one language within a particular language family. For example, nobody is actively learning any Dravidian language except Malayalam right now, no one seems to be learning a Tai-Kadai language other than Thai, etc. So if we organized the forum by language families, there would be a very strong skew in activity towards the Indo-European languages and almost nothing going on with a lot of the other language families, and I don't see any way a forum with that organization could be easy to manage. There's also a bit of a problem with accommodating languages whose linguistic affiliation is uncertain and with mixed languages (which rarely, if ever, can be placed in any single language family).
I think it would work out alright. The solution to the domination of IE is to make subforums for IE subfamilies, but in other cases to make the subforums for macro-families. Germanic and Romance would require a few moderators, and everything else only one. It's ok if say the Dravidian or Tai-Kadai subforums don't get much action. The families are simply so important that a unilang forum without them is incomplete. I would do it something like this:
Germanic
Romance
Balto-Slavic
Greek
Celtic
Iranian
Indo-Aryan
Sino-Tibetan
Japanese
Korean
Turkic
Austronesian
Niger-Congo
Afro-Asiatic
Austronesian
Dravidian
Austroasiatic
Tai-Kadai
Uralic
American Indigenous
Classical, Extinct
Conlang
Other
I diverge from the family methodology with the American indigenous languages because they are popular (and important) enough to deserve more than "Other", but it would be a hopeless mess to make subforums for their endless macro-families. I think the ruling logic on "Classical, Extinct" and "Conlang" is sound as well.
As far as the issue you brought up of uncertain linguistic affiliation, that is not an issue for any major languages if we can agree to put aside the Altaic spat, which is irrelevant in this case anyway because Altaic is varied and popular enough to get the subforum treatment of IE.
Ariki wrote:A reorganisation of some sort has to happen. I just quickly looked at the African Indigenous Languages forum and found a thread for Amharic which bemused me because it's a a member of Afro-Asiatic as Hebrew and Arabic are yet unless if you were interested in Proto-Afro-Asiatic or wanted to know the origins of Hebrew and Arabic you'd probably never realise that both are related to Amharic which only has a thread under African Indigenous Languages...
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