Marco Chiesa wrote:
Neil Harris wrote:
As an outsider to this argument, I know little other than what I have read on the mailing list and in articles, so I apologise in advance for any inaccuracies, but I think it goes something like this:
To a close approximation, Moldovan == Romanian, but written in Cyrillic, and is used in Moldova and Transnistria, which border Romania, and are closely historically and culturally related. There are considerably fewer mo: speakers (3.4 M in Rep. Moldova, 0.5M in Transnistria) than ro: speakers (24 M).
See [[Moldovan language]] for details.
As far I understand: Moldovan is written in Cyrillic only in Transnistria, while the rest of Moldova switched to the Latin script after gaining independence from the USSR; the Moldovan government states that the official language is called Moldovan, and it's the same language both in Moldova and Transnistria. Therefore, most of the Moldovan-speaking people have used Latin script for at least 15 years. For this reason, they don't think it is correct that the wikipedia called Moldovan uses Cyrillic. I understand they are ok to say Moldovan and Rumanian are the same language.
Yes, I'd forgotten that the Moldovans shifted back to the Latin alphabet. In which case, I can refine the suggestion a bit:
ro: and mo: should then share databases, and an auto-transliterating dual-script front end as in zh:, but the Cyrillic part of the interface should be disabled completely whenever accessed via the ro: domain name. Even when accessed via mo:, it should always default to the Latin alphabet (thus making the 27M Latin-script-using Moldovans and Romanians happier), at the cost of making the 0.5M Transnistrians, and a small minority of older Cyrillic-script-using Moldovans, slightly less happy than they would have been otherwise.
A possible spin on this approach: by getting the Transnistrians to share the same back-end DB, you could argue to nationalist Romanians that the Transnistrians are thus being drawn into the wider Romanian-language cultural sphere, whilst at the same time you could argue to nationalist Transnistrians that their own language/writing system combination is being given first-class support, without having the Latin script forced on them... so everybody's happy. Or am I being hopelessly unrealistic? (Yes. Of course I am.)
Do we have any actual Romanians, Moldovans or Transnistrians on this list who can give an opinion on this?
-- Neil