On 31/01/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste(a)dapyx.com> wrote:
Thursday, February 1, 2007, 12:49:01 AM, David wrote:
OTRS has received a request for this wiki to be
taken down, stating that
Moldovian is just Romanian written in cyrillic, in a way imposed by the
Communists. (I'm not saying this is true, I have no opinion on the
issue, I'm just reporting.)
The main issue is not that it was imposed by the Communists, but
that nobody wants to use it anymore. It was used before 1989 in
Moldova, but since, they switched back to Latin, so they're contributing
to Romanian Wikipedia.
True.
A small part of Moldova declared its independence and
with the help of
the Russian Army, they have a non-recognized government. A part of the
schools in this region still use the same textbooks printed 20 years
ago, in Cyrillic alphabet.
Not entirely true, and full of your own POV.
This usage is imposed by the region's government
(whos human rights
record is quite bad) and nobody wants to use the alphabet, there or
elsewhere. An interesting fact on this is that there were *no*
books or newspapers published in the last 15 years using this alphabet.
The human rights record of the PMR is debatable, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria
Also, it's not true that nobody wants to use the alphabet. If they
didn't, they could either: 1) Move to Moldova and send their kids to
schools there so they would learn Latin alphabet 2) Send their kids to
Romanian-medium schools in Transnistria, although their capacity is
limited so this is not necessarily an option 3) Send their kids to
Russian- or Ukrainian-medium schools so that they don't have to use
that alphabet for that language. Parents sending their kids to
Moldovan-medium schools in PMR is equivalent to an explicit
endorsement of the Cyrillic script. May I remind you that the majority
of ethnic Moldavians in PMR support its continued independence?
Regarding books or newspapers, I was pretty sure there was a
small-circulation newspaper in PMR in Moldavian, and I know that the
books of the legal proceedings of the constitutional court of the PMR
are published trilingually.
The international press usually ignored this subject
from this corner
of the earth, with just a few exceptions:
http://www.liberation.fr/actualite/monde/230766.FR.php?rss=true
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3936991.stm
...much to the contrary, you and yours were up in arms, constantly
citing BBC and CNN articles.
I have yet to meet a Moldovan who wants to use
Cyrillic alphabet in
Wikipedia -- the people who support Cyrillic Moldovan are almost
exclusively Russians and Ukrainians, with some Serbians and other
panslavists.
That's because the one or two that ever came, you scared them away
with your polemics.
As, such, with no actual native speaker, the Moldovan
Wikipedia lived
exclusively out of transliterations from Romanian Wikipedia.
This is an outright lie. Somewhere between 5% and 10% of the articles
on that WP are original, you know that yourself because one of them
you "corrected".
Mark