Jacky PB schreef:
Your question of "who regulates this language in Transnistria" assumes that a language needs regulation. This is not necessary at all...
Right. But a **standard**, like ISO-????, is about **standardisation**. That is, some form of standard language different from other standard languages in the dialect continuum. My question is: what will be the characteristics of Standard Moldovan, as defined by the standard?
A standard is there to provide information on what linguistic entities exist. When the Moldovans are happy to call their language Romanian that is what it will be. When others make a distinction between Romanian and Moldovan based on orthography, script whatever and, when this has always been known as Moldovan..
You brought this standard in the discussion saying that it will close the Romanian vs. Moldovan discussion. I hope it will, but can't help asking myself how. Just assigning language codes is not sufficient. Someone has to say: this is standard RO, this is standard MO, beat off. Can you? Is ISO-???? going to define this? Or just follow, I repeat, old Soviet practices, by saying: On our side of the fronteer the language is called Moldovan with code MO, on yours it is called Romanian with code RO, and they are different?
The notion of "old Soviet practices" is again very much a political way of looking at it. The notion of identifying linguistic entities is at issue. The whole point is in being able to identify unambiguously and having an application for such a distinction. Knowing what script/orthography to use is part of this.
The WMF has been great in allowing people to use their own language. When the language is mutually understandable, like for American and British English (and all the other variations) we have a history of keeping things together. When this is not the case, we have a history of bringing things together like we do for Chinese. What is acceptable is for one community to trash talk another. The politics around the Moldovan project make that people do not accept that some need Cyrillic content. The arguments used are political and have nothing to do with linguistics.
In order to get a solution people have to respect the needs of others and both vandalism or trash talking only serve to not get a solution where we can work on a joint project that can be read in either script/orthography and provides the NPOV which is central to what Wikipedia stands for. In my personal opinion, the quality of both the mo.wikipedia and the ro.wikipedia cannot be considered good when it is impossible to integrate and to serve the needs that are expressed by the existence of both projects.
Thanks, GerardM