On 31/01/07, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
Thursday, February 1, 2007, 12:49:01 AM, David wrote:
OTRS has received a request for this wiki to be taken down, stating that Moldovian is just Romanian written in cyrillic, in a way imposed by the Communists. (I'm not saying this is true, I have no opinion on the issue, I'm just reporting.)
The main issue is not that it was imposed by the Communists, but that nobody wants to use it anymore. It was used before 1989 in Moldova, but since, they switched back to Latin, so they're contributing to Romanian Wikipedia.
True.
A small part of Moldova declared its independence and with the help of the Russian Army, they have a non-recognized government. A part of the schools in this region still use the same textbooks printed 20 years ago, in Cyrillic alphabet.
Not entirely true, and full of your own POV.
This usage is imposed by the region's government (whos human rights record is quite bad) and nobody wants to use the alphabet, there or elsewhere. An interesting fact on this is that there were *no* books or newspapers published in the last 15 years using this alphabet.
The human rights record of the PMR is debatable, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria
Also, it's not true that nobody wants to use the alphabet. If they didn't, they could either: 1) Move to Moldova and send their kids to schools there so they would learn Latin alphabet 2) Send their kids to Romanian-medium schools in Transnistria, although their capacity is limited so this is not necessarily an option 3) Send their kids to Russian- or Ukrainian-medium schools so that they don't have to use that alphabet for that language. Parents sending their kids to Moldovan-medium schools in PMR is equivalent to an explicit endorsement of the Cyrillic script. May I remind you that the majority of ethnic Moldavians in PMR support its continued independence?
Regarding books or newspapers, I was pretty sure there was a small-circulation newspaper in PMR in Moldavian, and I know that the books of the legal proceedings of the constitutional court of the PMR are published trilingually.
The international press usually ignored this subject from this corner of the earth, with just a few exceptions:
http://www.liberation.fr/actualite/monde/230766.FR.php?rss=true http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3936991.stm
...much to the contrary, you and yours were up in arms, constantly citing BBC and CNN articles.
I have yet to meet a Moldovan who wants to use Cyrillic alphabet in Wikipedia -- the people who support Cyrillic Moldovan are almost exclusively Russians and Ukrainians, with some Serbians and other panslavists.
That's because the one or two that ever came, you scared them away with your polemics.
As, such, with no actual native speaker, the Moldovan Wikipedia lived exclusively out of transliterations from Romanian Wikipedia.
This is an outright lie. Somewhere between 5% and 10% of the articles on that WP are original, you know that yourself because one of them you "corrected".
Mark