Hoi,
Every relation is unique. There may be similarities but they are
differences at the same time. What you call Romanian is about people /
country what we are doing in the WMF is about language.
When there are some people that like to read Moldovan, there is no
reason why we should discriminate against them. The political
relevance it has, it has only because you making it relevant. The fact
that many people say the same thing does not mean that they are right.
The fact that politicans say things does not mean it is true.
On a larger scale, should it really matter what you or Mark believe
about nationality and ethnicity. What matters is that we allow the
other to have his or her POV. The main thing relevant is this POV in
the way of writing NPOV articles. If you argue that it cannot be NPOV
because of the language used, the argument would be a two-sided affair
and it would make everything you have written suspect as well.
I am interested in words, in lexicology. Having words that are used or
have been used makes sense. When Moldovan literature exists, there is
the possibility to get enough words in a digital way so that we can do
things. We could build spellcheckers for instance. Where you would
argue that nobody wants to write Moldovan, I would argue that Moldovan
has been written and therefore there is enough that can be OCR'd and
spellchecked. There is enough to want to collect Moldovan words and
find the words that have a different meaning in that context.
In the Netherlands there was this period where the protestants
destroyed religious imagery because of reasons of religion. Roman
statues in the Vatican have missing genitalia because of the
insistence of prudety. The attitude of denial of others is what
destroys a heritage that may be thought important in 100 years time.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 3/19/06, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) <rowikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2006/3/19, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>om>:
If we had such poor function in articles related to Bosnia, IE, that
they were dominated by Serbian ultranationalist trolls, they would
very likely say "Bosnian is essentially the same as Serbian" -- there
*are* relatively few differences, many of them are artificial, etc.
I think this links in to what I believe is the source of a lot of the
confusion related to Moldova(n) - the fact that the relationship between
Moldova and Romania is unique in the world, and there is no comparable case.
The Bosnia-Serbia case is different - Bosniaks are undoubtedly a separate
nation from Serbs, whereas Moldovans are still engaging in the process of
nation-building (or maybe moving away from it... the problem is that even in
the current confusion over nationality, the country is being pulled both
ways, one way towards a Romanian national identity, the other way towards a
separate Moldovan identity). So, this is why a lot of Romanians feel they
have authority to write about Moldovan subjects, because they consider
Moldovans to be the same nation as them.
Mark, of course, believes, from what I know, that there really is no
Romanian nationality, that the present "Romanian" ethnicity is really
Wallachian, and that Moldovans are hence different to Wallachians/Romanians,
and hence any form of Romanian intervention into Moldovan affairs is
(Wallachian) irredentism (consider, however, that current Wallachia is just
one of three regions of modern Romania, and is neither the most prosperous
nor the most significantly over-represented region in Romanian culture and
politics).
I think a similar situation to Moldova is that of Kosovo. That is, Kosovo is
to Albania as Moldova is to Romania, in many ways. Many people in Kosovo
would consider themselves Kosovars about 15 years after independence (or
maybe even now). Also, Just imagine for a second that during Yugoslav times,
the Kosovars had been taught that their language was called "Kosovar" and
made to write it using Cyrillic letters. That's sort of the situation we
have in Moldova now.
Ronline
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