Jacky PB schreef:
As I have
indicated before, the Moldovan language
entity will be part of
future development of the ISO-639. I have inside
information to this
effect from the ISO-639-6 standard that is under
development.
Can you tell us more on these developments? Are there
publicly-available documents?
At this moment it is not publicly available. I do not know much more
then the fact that Moldovan is in there.
I'm interested in one main point: is Moldovan
going to
be Latin-scripted, or Cyrillic-scripted?
This is important, because the choices are:
1. Moldovan is the latin-scripted language of the
Republic of Moldova, in which case there is no
regulatory board. Or, more precisely, there is one
(the Academy of Moldova), but it says "standard
Moldovan = standard Romanian".
2. Moldovan is the cyrillic-scripted language of
Transnistria, an entity recognized by nobody. BTW, who
regulates this language in Transnistria?
3. Moldovan is copied from old standards, maybe
without any assumption as to what it is, leaving it as
an object of contention and a relic of the cold war.
There is imho no such thing as a language being "owned" by a country
certainly not when it is crosses borders. There is no NEED for a country
to be recognised to have a difference in language/dialect/language
entity exist and to be recognised. The notion that something is a "relic
of the cold war" is a political assertion and is completely irrelevant
from a linguistic point of view. When people speak/use a
language/dialect/linguistic entity, they do. That is all there is to it.
The name Moldovan for the language is something that has its historic
roots. By having a war and not winning it, by decreeing that the
Cyrillic script is not to be used, you do not change the association of
the name with the total populace speaking the language. Where the
Moldovan government says that Moldovan equals Romanian, I expect that
the Moldovan and the Romanian government work together when it comes to
this, now shared need, to agree on how to manage the language from an
official pov.
The fact that a country does not own a language is demonstrated
admirably by the Mapuche people who are suing the Chilean government and
Microsoft because they disagree with the notion that the Chilean
government can impose an orthography. Mupundungun is spoken in both
Chile and Argentina.
Your question of "who regulates this language in Transnistria" assumes
that a language needs regulation. This is not necessary at all, many
languages are recognised some are more like a language continuum.
Thanks,
GerardM