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Recently sawa has been on an edit crusade, and he has been deleting a bunch of tags and adding a new tag that says .

  1. What is "register" supposed to mean?

  2. In one instance, sawa deleted "feminine-speech" with "register". I can understand "feminine-speech", but not register. How does "register" help me find questions about, for example, use of わ at the end of sentences, and other instances of what I would consider feminine forms of speech?

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  • +1 Because I was coming here to ask this :D
    – silvermaple
    Dec 27, 2011 at 22:39
  • +1 i'm not very active on this site, but as someone with 3 foreign languages under his belt (not including japanese =) i agree with this retagging. being aware of register is a very important part of language learning.
    – ixtmixilix
    Feb 6, 2012 at 17:41
  • @ixtmixilix: This question is not in support of the edit. It's not explicitly against it, either, but personally I'm not in favour of having to learn new linguistic terms to learn Japanese.
    – Questioner
    Feb 7, 2012 at 5:32

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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At the minimum, retaggers should supply a tag wiki when replacing a less complex term with a more technical and abstract term.

Currently, and lack tag wikis and have been used for retagging.

You could look the terms up in Wikipedia, but it's better to have descriptions that apply to Japanese in particular rather than all languages, which is what Wikipedia would have.

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Check out this Wikipedia article.

a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.

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    As a starter, I put that sentence from Wikipedia in the tag wiki along with the link to Wikipedia.
    – Tsuyoshi Ito
    Dec 27, 2011 at 13:55
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    Huh. Thanks for clarifying. Although, now that I know what it means... it's so general it can apply to almost anything. If I wanted to look up instances of feminine speech, is it really better to try and find it with "register" which will include absolutely every other kind of "particular purpose" speech as well?
    – Questioner
    Dec 27, 2011 at 15:58
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    Is being female a particular purpose, or is it a particular social setting?
    – Andrew Grimm
    Dec 28, 2011 at 3:30
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    @AndrewGrimm. Yes and no. "No" because physical sex is inherent. "Yes" because you can intentionally play the part of either sex and the other characteristics that typically represent that particular sex.
    – Flaw Mod
    Dec 28, 2011 at 11:08
  • Could we use words for tags that non-linguists understand too?
    – Kdansky
    Feb 1, 2012 at 12:00

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