I personally don't consider it appropriate, but it's very confusing.
Mo.wiki already exists and is being used for Cyrillic already, but
Ronline wants the Cyrillic content to either be moved to mo-cyr:, or
have mo: in both alphabets.
This situation is different from Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian for one
reason especially. Linguists and scientists from these countries
(Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia) like to make all sorts of claims about
the distinctness of their respective languages, while in Moldova, the
official Academy of Science declares on its website even that Moldovan
and Romanian are identical, and a man who published a
"Romanian-Moldovan dictionary" was mocked on national television. What
I mean is, only 30% of Moldovans claim they speak the "Moldovan
language", and that is possibly a question of naming - even less would
tell you "Moldovan" and "Romanian" are different languages.
What you say about not having Cyrillic content at ro: is totally
missing my point there. I personally believe that Romanian and
Moldovan are close enough that in most pages on Wikipedia, there would
only be differences in spelling with a few minor differences in
terminology (Moldovan also has a tendency to use less French and
Italian words). Most people who speak Moldovan or Romanian agree that
they are identical.
I am claiming a double standard on the part of some main anti-Cyrillic
people such as Danutz, who say "Moldovan and Romanian are the same
thing. All Moldovans speak Romanian. There is no such language as
Moldovan. Anybody who says they speak Moldovan must be a communist",
then "Indeed 10% of speakers of "Moldovan" use Cyrillic" and then
"Nobody who speaks Romanian uses Cyrillic". If Moldovan _is_ Romanian,
then some speakers of Romanian use Cyrillic.
And it should be emphasised that this is not merely a question of
nationality - plenty of Moldovans (the majority, in fact) claim to
speak "Romanian". This includes the majority of users of the Cyrillic
script, who also call it "Romanian" (probably a little less than half
of Cyrillic users - I don't mean "enthusiasts" who want to restore a
dead script, I mean people who learnt this as their first alphabet in
school, and still prefer to use it today and often do - call it
"Moldovan").
This means that some people who visit a "Romanian Wikipedia" might
prefer to read content in Cyrillic - after all, 1% of all speakers of
Romanian/Moldavian combined prefer the Cyrillic script to the Roman
script - and I believe that is significant enough that we should
provide content for them.
So the way I see it is: It is preferable that ro.wiki is bi-scriptal,
but of course this will not happen in a million years because of such
contradictory beliefs as illustrated above (it should be noted that
Ronline believes - at least it would seem he does - that Romanian and
Moldovan are truly separate languages), so we can just stick to the
status quo which is changing the letter infront to an "m" if you want
Cyrillic, and if you end up at mo: wanting Latin content, you click in
to get it immediately.
I do not appreciate the involvement of Ronline, Danutz, and other
ro.wikipedians in what I see as a relatively petty issue. As you can
see from usage statistics, mo.wiki gets less than 100 visits a year,
and I can tell you that most of those are from me and Vertaler and
Danutz and Ronline and devs and stewards and the like. And, all those
complaining are Romanian citizens who mainly use ro.wiki and claim
their mother tongue as "Romanian", and it is my guess that most have
never been to Moldova and that most have seen only a couple of texts
in their lives spelled in a Moldovan fashion. These people aren't so
upset about a language they claim to use or have as their mother
tongue or even a language which has some attachment to them at all,
they are interfering on a nationalist basis in an entirely separate
Wikipedia. So far the only reaction from Moldovans on mo: has been
tiny but it has been supportive and positive.
Many Serbians (though certainly not all) believe Bosnian is a dialect
of Serbian or is identical, but there is no interference with Serbians
complaining about the Bosnian Wikipedia or vice-versa, and Serbian is
bi-scriptal even though Latin is mostly used for "Montenegrin" which
is in a similar situation to Moldovan (except it isn't officially
recognised as a separate language).
To be fair Ronline does not focus on the fact that mo.wiki is
currently separate from ro.wiki, but this seems to be a main focus for
most of the other people interested.
Another question that may arise is: Is Romanian spelling convertable
by computer to Moldovan spelling and vice-versa? The answer is yes.
But, is Latin alphabet of this language convertable to Cyrillic
alphabet for this language by computer? No, because there are not
exact correspondences. "ia" can sometimes be "i-ya" in Cyrillic and
other times "i-a" (not using actual Cyrillic letters, just a
transcription), "iu" can be "i-yu", "i-u", "`-yu",
and most
importantly there are 3 possible conversions in Cyrillic for the Latin
"i". Also, in some words (almost all foreign), the "g" sound in
"gi"
or "ge" can be transliterated as a "zh" with a breve over it, and it
others (both foreign and non-foreign) it is written without due to an
actual difference in pronunciation. There are however a system of
complex situational rules that can cover perhaps 80% of the
ambiguities, but these might require computer parsing, needing to know
how a word is actually pronounced, and for complete accuracy you would
need a lexicon of "exceptions".
I only talk about the computer conversion because the question has
arisen in the past over script diffferences (Kurdish, Serbian).
Mark
On 4/13/05, Wouter Steenbeek <musiqolog(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
This is familiar kind of problem, remember the quite
recent controversy with
Serbocrotian on the one, and Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak on the other. I,
as a Western European, could easily dismiss claims on speaking a separate
language as politically inspired nonsense, but in countries like these with
a heavily charged recent past, questions like these are controversial. On
the other hand, this discussion is also current in Moldovia itself, I heard.
I propose that you allow Latin script Moldavian on ro: only, and that you
look for five enthousiasts (including you yourself, of course) for the
Moldovian-only Cyrillic version, not to be allowed on ro:, since virtually
no Romanians can read it. The rest of the procedure must be familiar to you,
I suppose. This leaves only the question of the name: ro-cy or mol-cy. Do
you consider this an appropriate solution?
Wouter
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