Talk:Kraasna dialect

Sources

The only source with alot of information was from a free site, i wonder if that is a problem and if the aricle will get deleted? (https://kraasna.wordpress.com/) --ValtteriLahti12 (talk) 15:28, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

​Self-published sources are generally not used on Wikipedia. The site does have a list of bibliography [1], if you have access to any of these sources it would be possible to use them instead – Thjarkur (talk) 16:21, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

I will look into it --ValtteriLahti12 (talk) 16:23, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

I did not find them, should we delete the things found in https://kraasna.wordpress.com/ (thus making the article way shorter) or??? --ValtteriLahti12 (talk) 16:28, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

​​ I am happy to see that you added an entry on the Kraasna dialect, that was well overdue. Thank you for your work of adding this entry – I found it this week when had my students do an exercise on finding sources for this variety, so, this comment will contain both information on Kraasna and information literacy as such (I am sorry if this sounds like a lecture). I am referring to the latest version (7 January 2021):
I read the talk and I looked at the edits – I get the impression that the whole work went like this: You found a website with a lot of research, read it, summarised it, and added information and quotes with the citation. Then you started questioning the reliability of the source because it is not in a journal or other published venue. You decided that unreliable sources should be removed, while keeping some information on it without the attribution. Now there is a citation with a lacking and wrong reference – and I have several issues with that.
First of all, I need to identify myself as the one who created the website. It contains about five years of research on the Kraasna dialect, including a BA and an MA thesis, both of which also won scholarly awards, and several talks at scientific conferences. All of this information is on the website – and my students received the same piece of advice – if you are uncertain about the reliability of a source, check the author. There is a link to my academic profile, a link to my publications, and a contact form. Using these sources, you can find out that I am a researcher and that the website is genuine. Even if you still had doubts, there is no issue in just emailing me. Most researchers will be happy if someone is interested in their topic, and, even more importantly, deems their research interesting enough to be included on Wikipedia (and most will support that). I would have written the Wikipedia article myself but decided to adhere to the policy of "no advertisement of own publications" and, realistically, you can count the people actively researching the Kraasna dialect on one hand (sadly). This is a very niche topic and most of what I know comes from my own research. I see that you also had issues locating some of the sources – again, no shame to ask active researchers for their help. There is a bibliography on my website which should provide everyone with an orientation in the topic and I am happy to help if there are problems. Some of the sources are archival sources which requires talking to the right archives and I will gladly share my experiences of that. Yet, a lot of the information is not available in English, which makes it very difficult to find out more about this topic... the very reason for the existence of my website.
I recognise that Wikipedia does not want personal websites as references. Yet they open the possibilty of doing so in their guidelines: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications" WP:SPS. A few comments on that: Yes, it is true that the website is hosted by wordpress – this is merely due to the fact that when I started my work in 2016, I did not know how much or what kind of information I would have available and was not able to estimate the need for a proper website. I had no official funding and was not able to pay for web-hosting, thus had to rely on a free hosting service like wordpress. Besides, reference 3 is also a website by a researcher, with the only difference that he had funding for paying for a proper website and domain, whereas my website is relying on a cheapskate solution. One more point on the lack of official publications: I hope to have four papers on the Kraasna variety and its speakers published this year – it's coming, but having other projects to finish as well, I only got around to publishing full papers now. The information is roughly summarised on my website already. In case you want to cite the information from the website but not give wordpress as the source, feel free to cite my unpublished BA and MA dissertations. They may be unpublished but, as they were necessary to qualify for the award of a degree, my universities need to hold copies (i.e. anyone could ask to read them, it just takes more effort). If you have any questions, simply ask.
Now for the less pleasant part, and I am sorry if I appear slightly miffed about it – it was my research goal to create transparency and accessibility to the Kraasna sources, and I would hate for my own research to have the opposite effect by blurring lines even more. If anyone read the article in its current state, they would find an example without proper attribution which stems from a "recording" on a PDF in a random Dropbox folder, possibly collected by Kallas in 1893. None of this is correct! The PDF is a part of my BA thesis, which is uploaded onto my website – either of those can be cited. It does not belong to dropbox and it does not even belong to me! As you know, I worked with archival sources which I digitised for my project. That means, that the PDF is an excerpt created by me based on a manuscript in an archive. By using these manuscripts, I entered into an agreement with the archives that any use of their materials shall be acknowledged and referenced properly. So, not only is the current article version failing to recognise my efforts and intellectual work but also not providing the relevant information as mandated by the owners of the original sources. This is verging on plagiarism and certainly not in the spirit of Wikipedia. If you check my website, it is all mentioned there [2]: "Please reference this page (kraasna.wordpress.com) and, if applicable, any underlying archival sources. You can find more information on the archival sources in the bibliography and links tab. [...] Please use the materials only in accordance with the appropriate attribution. [...] the original sources and any copies thereof remain the property of the respective archives. Please cite the archival sources as originals, even if you are using my transcriptions."
I trust you that there was no malign intent – on the contrary, I am happy to see interest and effort to spread information on the Kraasna dialect. I would still like to ask you to include the correct references and give credit to all stakeholders: my transcriptions of the archives' materials, collected by a researcher from a consultant (in cases where we have this information). This would also be best practice for any (official) linguistic research paper on this topic. And once my real publications are accepted, we can also include more official sources in the article.
I hope that you understand my concerns. If you want to discuss anything or have further questions on my research, feel free to email me [3] – I am happy to help! Maybe a final question, if I may, what sparked your interest in the Kraasna dialect and South Estonian dialectology overall?
Minor corrections:

1. Kraasna was not only documented by Kallas; he was the first but not the only researcher to do fieldwork there.
2. Kallas visited the Ludza Estonians (Lutsi) in 1983 and published his monograph on the Lutsi in 1894. He didn't visit the Kraasna Estonians then. His fieldwork there was in 1901, with publications following that date (1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1910).
3. Example requires more information - example of what? Roughly speaking, we could include four examples of each period of research (1840s, 1900s, 1910s, 1950-60s).
4. external link mentions a recording; AES202 is a textual source (the cited part was transcribed from a recording by the author of the manuscript)
5. Reference 4: Should be "Pajusalu". Can you also give the full bibliographic reference? [4]

Kraasnologist (talk) 10:12, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

I did not want to risk using bad sources because i had been using them before wrongly (because i did not read wikipedia rules when i first joined a long ago and then just forgot to do so), so i wanted to be extra careful. If wikipedia moderators think the source should be OK to use it could be reverted to the old version. --ValtteriLahti12 (talk) 12:08, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

​ Thank you for the first round of edits! Here is more information on the sources you were looking for:

• You were looking for information on the 1960's Kraasna rememberers. How do we know? There is a recording (basically two but they sound identical) in an archive: F1223-02 and -03 in the Archives of Estonian Dialectes and Kindred Languages at the University of Tartu [5]. These sources appear to have a date 1968, although I am not too sure about the actual date. But we can say that there were descendants of the Kraasna Estonians remembering a few words.
  
• About the date of extinction: There is a newspaper report from 2004 in the Võro journal "Uma Leht", volume 53 [6]. What it says is basically: Already in 1968 there were no more speakers (somehow connecting to the first point). They cite a researcher from the 2004 expedition «Asi om niikavvõl, et 80-aastanõ mäletäs, et ku tä lats' oll', sis vanaesä kõnõl' tõist kiilt, ja ku külämehe tulli kokko, laulti tõisi laulõ,» - so, in 2004, an 80-year-old remembers that his grandfather spoke a foreign language. If we calculate that the 80-year-old in 2004 was a child in the 1930s, we can conclude that up to the 1930s the language was spoken. I do have other sources which indicate the same but that is not yet published anywhere.
• The Kraasna dialect was first "discovered" in 1849 when F.R. Kreutzwald sent a letter to his colleague A.J. Brandt. This was described in an article by Enn Ernits [7], pages 42 following. Oskar Kallas "rediscovered" that research when he conducted fieldwork on the Lutsi in 1893. He went to visit Kraasna in 1901, as he describes in his 1903 monograph [8]. There he also mentions that around 1901 there were less than a hundred Estonian speakers in the area.
• The largest bulk of data stems from Heikki Ojansuu, a Finn, who went to Kraasna in 1911/12 and 1914. We know that only from his manuscripts, as he didn't publish on his field trips. But there is, for example, the AES 202 (which I typed up for my research) as a scanned copy in the EMSUKA archive [9]
• About grammar (more to follow): There is a book on Estonian dialects published in 2018, including a page on the Kraasna dialect [10], pages 200-201. What we can learn from there is that the Kraasna Estonians arrived in the area at the end of the 16th century, that the language is clearly Eastern Seto, kept some archaic features but also a few innovations from the Võro-speaking regions. Translative and abessive are similar to Seto, while not explicitly mentioned, the source mentions an abessive suffix -ldA and the translative marker -st, both of which are linked to Seto and some Eastern Võro varieties. Curious features are the elision of vowels in unstressed syllables and the addition of j before i and e in word-initial position. As my research showed (not published yet), that also affected ü.

What I would still want to add is more information on the example. This is an example which I transcribed from the manuscript AES 202. The lines in it are presumably from Ojansuu's 1914 research and stem from a phonograph recording, as the heading in AES 202 says. If we compare it with other sources, we can see that it is different from Kallas' texts or the 1960's word fragments. So, for me, it would be an example of the 1910's Kraasna dialect - we could also add other examples from the sources, I am happy to help select a few. It should have the mention of my transcription and of the Ojansuu transcription in the AES202 manuscript. Errors could be mine or could be Ojansuu's - thus, we should include both references; we also don't know what these recordings really sounded like.
There will be more to follow, once my publications are accepted. Kraasnologist (talk) 15:43, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

If info is added about the example, what sources can i use? --ValtteriLahti12 (talk) 17:12, 18 January 2021 (UTC)