Talk:klausītājies

95.68.111.174, I repeat here the arguments I laid out in the discussion page of your Request for Deletion (rfd); the request was not accepted. My arguments for inclusion are:

• about 60 google occurrences (in the nominative singular form; I haven't searched for other forms, i.e. there may be more), many of which are in modern texts (for instance, this one, 1st paragraph, 5th line from top; and this one, bottom of page, after "Piemēram", and this one, 2nd paragraph, example list, and this one; sec. 3.2, 2nd paragraph, and this one (Latvijas Radio, 10:10, last word in green text), and this one (scroll past "more responses"; at one point MadArmy answers to Raiiichuuu: Es arī viens to TZT.lv klausītājies?? man teica ka esi!), and this one (next to the photo of Jānis Beloglazovs, last sentence but one), and this one (5th paragraph, last sentence), and this one (last paragraph but one), and...;
• mentioned in the following books:

• Fennell, T.G., & H. Gelsen. 1980. A Grammar of Modern Latvian. The Hague: Mounton Publishers (ISBN: 90 279 7936 7). (On p. 1070, the full paradigm of klausītājies and klausītājās is given as examples of the declension of reflexive nouns, together with vēlējumies. NB: in 1980, not in the 19th century.

• Ceplīte, B., & L. Ceplītis. 1997 (1991). Latviešu Valodas Praktiskā Gramatika. Rīga: Zvaigzne ABC. (ISBN: 9984-04-641-9). On p.23, again both klausītājies and the feminine form klausītājās are mentioned as examples of reflexive nouns, without any mention of their being 'obsolete', and this in 1997(1991), not in the 19th century. In case you don't have this book, here is the relevant quote, from p.23 (emphasis added):

ATGRIEZENISKIE LIETVĀRDI

Atgriezeniskie lietvārdi beidzas ar -šanās, -TĀJIES, -tājās, 
-ējies, -ājies, -umies: klausišanās, pārvēršanās, saprašanās;
KLAUSĪTĀJIES, KLAUSĪTĀJĀS; smējējies, smējējās; vēlējumies.
Šiem vārdiem nav dažu locījumu formu.

Vienskaitlis
=======================================================
N. sarakstīšanās, KLAUSĪTĀJIES, KLAUSĪTĀJĀS, vēlējumies
Ģ. sarakstīšanās, KLAUSĪTĀJĀS,  KLAUSĪTĀJĀS, ---
D. ---            ---           ----         ---
A. sarakstīšanos, KLAUSĪTĀJOS,  KLAUSĪTĀJOS, vēlējumos
I. sarakstīšanos, KLAUSĪTĀJOS,  KLAUSĪTĀJOS, vēlējumos
L. ---            ---           ---          ---

Daudzskaitlis
=======================================================
N. sarakstīšanās, KLAUSĪTĀJIES, KLAUSĪTĀJĀS, vēlējumies
Ģ. sarakstīšanos, KLAUSĪTĀJOS,  KLAUSĪTĀJOS, ---
D. ---            ---           ---          ---
A. sarakstīšanās, KLAUSĪTĀJOS,  KLAUSĪTĀJĀS, vēlējumos
I. ---            ---           ---          vēlējumos
L. ---            ---           ---          ---

Now, here's the thing. I'm not claiming to know your language better than you do. I obviously don't. I'm simply claiming that, according to the criteria for inclusion in Wiktionary, klausītājies deserves to be here. It has sufficiently many legitimate attestations (I think 3 is the usual number here) in the Internet and elsewhere; i.e., the word does exist. Now, is it {{rare}}, {{dated}}, {{archaic}}, or {{obsolete}}? A quick look at the Google examples suggests that it is {{rare}}, maybe {{dated}} or {{archaic}}; {{obsolete}} is clearly too strong (according to Appendix:Glossary, {{obsolete}} implies that the term "is likely not to be understood" (an old Latvian form like asms "eighth" is an example of an obsolete form, that modern speakers would probably not understand); do you think that a native speaker of Latvian would not even understand the word klausītājies if s/he happened to see it in a sentence? It's so similar to klausītājs that I'd imagine it would be easy to understand. I'll go with rare, perhaps archaic for the time being, until there's more evidence to judge.

Now, please don't think that I'm trying to offend you, or to claim that I know more than you about Latvian. Of course I don't. And nobody is claiming that klausītājies is "frequently/currently used". It's quite obvious that klausītājs is the most frequent term. The Google search itself shows that klausītājies is at least rare; but clearly it exists. The basic point is simply that there are attestations, and attestations are what dictionaries are based on -- not the feelings of this or that specific person, native speaker, scientist, specialist, or whatever. The authors of dictionaries don't simply sit down and list only those words they know well; they look at corpora and add the words they find there, even if they don't "like" them. It's the only way to avoid bias (towards one's regional dialect, one's level of education, one's register, one's social class, one's circle of friends, one's grammatical preferences...).

And that, because native speakers differ. I've often seen native speakers disagree about words. ("You can't say that!" "Yes you can!") I've often myself disagreed with others about words in my own native language, Brazilian Portuguese. Because no single person knows "everything," even about their own language, such disagreements are normal. There's nothing bad or wrong or stupid about them; they're human.

So we go by attestations. You can check those, look for others, argue that these should be dismissed and why -- please feel free to do so. And also to add any other comments, notes, disagreements, ideas, or to add new word entries, definitions, translations (thanks for correcting that translation in rinda, by the way).

All the best. --Pereru (talk) 15:29, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Getting 60 hits from Google in general doesn't exactly testify to word being in use. Let's see: 1. Pre-WWII source 2. Read the very last sentence explictly stating that in modern Latvian only reflexives that end in -šanās are used 3. Names any other use "extremely rare" 4. Couldn't find it (I am using cell phone here with no ctrl+f and section numbering is ambigious), but note that it is scholary article that includes other obsolete forms - I noticed examples of dual that is so obscure that it often is considered not to be preserved in Latvian 5. It's a radio schedule, it may well be a spelling mistake 6. Couldn't find it 7. I doubt material from what appears to be diaspora newspaper from the 80s exemplifies contemporary usage as diaspora Latvian is known to be ultra conservative, but okay 8. That sentence is "Kā notis tā skaņuplates Kanādā ir pieejamas", there is though google hit from the website using it as example of "using ancient archaic forms", and that from diaspora source that acctualy seems to like the term! 9.&10. Okay, but those too could testify to forms existance in past not acctual use

Now, I read your sources before and did a bit of googling myself, I am no longer proposing merge (although I don't really see purpose of having seperate entry on each inflection, especialy such as this one, where it is only in one language and could be redirected, but then I don't know Wiktionary all that well), why can't we list the form as obsolete though, when it is out of use? And yes I wouldn't understand it is a valid inflection and think it is a mistake as my initial reaction should have shown you 95.68.111.174 08:10, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

On afterthought - if all there is in 6. is what you quoted it also could be a mistake - the guy clearly misspells first word and his choise of words in general seems bizzare. Also [www.liis.lv/latval/Valoda/Teksts/3nodalja/Citati/8.htm here] is scholary analysis apparently written in 1901 that allready describes it as rare 95.68.111.174 08:36, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Let me say this again: inclusion is not precluded if the word is rare, or old, only if it doesn't exist and never did. It's not a problem if klausītājies is rare, regional, dated, or archaic; it's still a word, it exists, it should be here. It's only a problem if I make up a word (say, "agluntāls") and then want to include it here as if it were a real Latvian word. Wiktionary does not include only words in active use. Or, in other words: Wiktionary is not a dictionary of CONTEMPORARY usage only. All the Gothic words here (there are thousands) are not in use, of course. Yet they are here, and they should be. Wiktionary aims to include all words, from all languages, from all times.

So: all your comments about those attestations indicating that the word is old are irrelevant to inclusion. If the word is old, it must be marked as such (hence the "dated, perhaps archaic" tag), not deleted. Other than that, AFAIK, nothing needs to be done here. (One question: why would a radio schedule do a spelling mistake that coincides exactly with the form cited in two grammars of Latvian? Isn't it more likely that the person who wrote the radio schedule actually saw the word somewhere else? Perhaps in older books, or from older people who might still use it? Just curious -- either way, this doesn't change the fact that the word should be here.)

The purpose of a separate entry for every inflectional form is simplicity for the casual user. If someone sees a word in Latvian somewhere and wants to find out what it means, and if this person doesn't know what the basic form of the word is, then they won't find it here, unless all inflected forms -- plurals, feminines, genitives, datives, first-person present singulars, etc. -- are listed independently (all linked to the basic entry or lemma, of course). Also older spellings (like kaŗš are listed here -- together with all their inflected forms -- since a person might see the word written like that and want to know what it means. Since there is no problem of space here -- Wiktionary is not paper -- all those things can be done. (They even include here common misspellings -- like (deprecated template usage) vocal chord instead of (deprecated template usage) vocal cord -- on the assumption that, if the misspellings are sufficiently frequent, people might look the word up in this form, not in the correct one...). In other words, the Wiktionary ideal -- All words in all languages -- implicitly means also "all inflected forms". And again, I like this ideal. How many times have I gotten angry at a dictionary that didn't have an irregular verb form with a "redirect" to the basic form, so I couldn't find out what a certain word meant...?

On listing the form as "obsolete": and why not "dated"? Or "archaic"? Well -- at Appendix:Glossary, Wiktionary defines what is meant here by "obsolete". I think klausītājies fits "dated", perhaps "archaic", better than "obsolete", since it is still understandable and recognized by some speakers (as some of those attestations I listed make clear -- the one who says this is an "old-fashioned expression"). It's not like English anon, which is really obsolete (more 16th/17th-centurish, already seen as "dated/archaic" in the 19th century), nor is it like balsskanis, a 19th-century proposed word that was fully replaced by patskanis since Endzelins and Milenbahs' Latvian Grammar -- in fact, patskanis was officially adopted as the standard term in the 1920s (according to the Latvian Etymological Dictionary), which made balsskanis officially obsolete. So, it seems to me "obsolete" is not quite the word yet, though it might be in a couple of centuries. But I'm not definitely "in love" with this either, and criteria are always a little fluid. Maybe my main reason for resisting "obsolete" is that klausītājies is still cited -- not only cited, but given as the declension-table example of a paradigm -- in two recent Latvian grammars, including one written entirely in Latvian, and in Latvia, plus other online versions. Why would they, among other possibilities, select exactly the obsolete term to exemplify that group of words? (Perhaps we could contact them -- B. Ceplīte and L. Ceplītis --; they must have an e-mail... Perhaps the publisher -- Zvaigzne ABC -- would know?) --Pereru (talk) 12:06, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

RFM discussion: July 2012

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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klausītājies

An anonymous user added a rfm template to this word, claiming it doesn't exist. I think it does, however, for the following reasons:

1. I found it in a reputable source (Fennell, T.G, & H. Gelsen. 1980. A Grammar of Modern Latvian. Paris, New York, The Hague: Mouton Publishers. →ISBN, where it is not only mentioned, but given as the basic example of a set of words with irregular defective declension (the full defective paradigm of klausītājies is given on p. 1070).
2. A google search reveals several occurrences (59) of the word, including several folk songs, and also a Latvijas Radio programme for 02-11-2011 (last word in the green text at 10:10 and at 23:10).

The total number of occurrences, however, is low, even taking into account the relatively small number of Internet pages in Latvian, and this word has a more regular counterpart klausītājs (which is where the anonymous user wants to move klausītājies to). This rarity, together with the existence of the more regular counterpart, is probably what motivates the anonymous user's impression that the word doesn't exist. I suggest that this word be kept, perhaps with an added context tag like 'rare' or 'old fashioned'. --Pereru (talk) 02:57, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Create the regular form and make this an alternative form iff you can actually cite it (I believe Latvian still requires 3 citations). This doesn't really belong at RFM. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 12:20, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

The Google search I mentioned above yielded 59 results, many legitimate. Do these count as citations? Should they go on the citation page? (I haven't done anything with citations thus far. There probably is a page here at Wiktionary about how to handle citations, right? Could you direct me to it?) Well, I'll create the regular page, link klausītājies to it as an alternate form (but keeping the declension, which is different and irregular), and remove the RFM tag. --Pereru (talk) 17:08, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Crash course on citations: citations must be durably archived (so, not off a Google search). Effectively, citations must be from Google Books, Google Groups, or a physical book/magazine/newspaper. Citations must be uses, not mentions (see w:use-mention distinction), so dictionaries don't count except for example sentences. For Latvian, every sense needs three citations to pass RFV. Citations must be formatted according to WT:". Does that cover it sufficiently? --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:39, 19 July 2012 (UTC)