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How similar should two questions be to qualify as duplicates?

I'm thinking particularly of Add an Arab Word within an English Document and Arabic and greek inline text in russian document pdflatex. But the question is more general.

Conceptually, these questions are the same and the the user who asked to second question was able to answer his own question with the help of the older question.

But adding and an Arabic word into an English document is not actually the same as adding one into a Russian document…

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    Ironically, I think this question is a duplicate of tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2770/87678… which I failed to notice when I posted :(.
    – David Purton
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 14:35
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    This is a conundrum. I agree that the question using Russian isn't a duplicate, but it contained an answer that the OP was able to use. Many questions have been closed for the reason "solved in comments" (which is not at all specific in regard to helping someone else). Unfortunately, "related" questions are often noted in coments, where they are apt to get lost. The cited "non-duplicate" doesn't seem to be listed in the "automatic" related list so it's "new information". That's what we need a function for, to be able to save such items in a useful way.
    – barbara beeton
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 18:25
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    One thing that is important about duplicates is that it is the question and not the answer that should define a duplicate. Of course at the right level of abstraction, all questions of the form "How do I put language X into a document of language Y" are the same, but I think there is definitely room for a few versions of these questions simply due to the fact that for some values of X and Y, different scripts and/or RTL vs LTR might be involved, so the answers may not always be the same. So in this particular case, it's probably fine not to close as a duplicate.
    – Alan Munn
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 3:39

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Since my comment seems to have some votes, I'll add it as an answer:

One thing that is important about duplicates is that it is the question and not the answer that should define a duplicate. Of course at the right level of abstraction, all questions of the form "How do I put language X into a document of language Y" are the same, but I think there is definitely room for a few versions of these questions simply due to the fact that for some values of X and Y, different scripts and/or RTL vs LTR might be involved, so the answers may not always be the same. So in this particular case, it's probably fine not to close as a duplicate.

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