What language should our tags be in?

Question

This site is going to have a rather unique issue with tag names that I don't think has been addressed on any other SE site so far. Many Buddhist terms lack canonical (non-borrowed) English equivalents, and Buddhism itself does not have only a single canonical language (unlike e.g. Islam/Judaism). We will need to decide what language our tags (specifically, the master synonyms for the tags) should be in, and I think the earlier we figure this out the better.

There are many possible languages for tags about concepts in Buddhism. Take, for example, "dharma". Do we use the Sanskrit "dharma", the Pali "dhamma", the Chinese "fǎ", the Japanese "hō"? In this particular case, I think we would all agree that "dharma" is best because it is most frequently used by English speakers, but I'm sure there are trickier cases that we will need to handle.

We need not select a single language for all our tags, but we do need a strategy for selecting which language we should pick for any given tag. The simplest heuristic is "what do the majority of English speakers call this concept?", but there may be others that would be better.

Also - once this site's pro tempore moderators are selected, I think it will be important for them to do a fair bit of work creating alternate-language tag synonyms for tags in order to increase tag findability. So if we decide that "dharma" should be the tag, we should also add, at minimum, the Pali "dhamma" as a synonym, and possibly also the Chinese and Japanese equivalents if those are used frequently. (On a larger site, we could do this democratically by voting on tag synonyms, but no new site reaches the point where that becomes feasible for some months.)

Answer 1

Providing a suggestion here, as a possible solution, instead of commenting further on the question.

I suggest that since the Buddhism StackExchange relies heavily on searches, it would benefit from using the language most searched for, as the primary language. Other languages would be set up as synonyms.

Searching Google Trends for common Sanskrit and Pali terms, (Dharma/Dhamma, Karma/Kamma) reveals that Sanskrit is in favor of being the selected language, out of the older languages.

The question is whether English should be a candidate for a primary tag language - and the suggestion here is no, since translations are often ambiguous in meaning and many words do not exist in English.

Another point to make is to allow for all languages in tags - so whoever asks the question can use the language most relevant to the question. For example, my question directly relating to Theravada, would be most relevant with Pali tags, since the question refers directly to that tradition and language.

EDIT: From the Meta help at SE:

How should we tag questions about {subject}?

Tagging questions is an ad hoc way of organizing content. It is mostly improvised by users asking the questions… but only to a point. Tag auto-completion and community editing will influence the proper use of tags for a very long time.

The type of things you should look out for: how to handle acronyms common to your subject, brand versus product-specific tags, common terminology, and the use of semantic tags to categorize specific types of questions unique to your community. Every site will have their own unique set of tag-related issues.

The best way to identify tagging problems is to watch new posts closely, and try to build tag wiki excerpts that explain what the tags are for. When tags become ambiguous, too specific (or not specific enough), or just somehow off, raise those issues in meta, and quickly. Proper tagging is very much a lead-by-example activity. The sooner you get the “community standards” for tagging ironed out, the less chance you’ll have to face the drudgery of cleaning them up later.