On 03/12/05, Field Nothing <fieldtheory2(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
But what about
Transdnistria?
As I know, they use Moldovan language (also Russian and Ukrainian) but
use Cyrillic script.
Transdnistria is not an independent state, it is a part of Moldova and it is
Transnistrian authorities would beg to differ. If Transnistria isn't
independent, then how come Moldovan laws don't work there? Sure,
they're not recognised by other countries as independent, but Moldova
doesn't control it either. And can a nation really reasonably claim
territory it doesn't have control over?
Take the example of Taiwan. The communist People's Republic of China
claims it as theirs, and even has a provincial administration for it.
And yet, the laws made by the provincial administration are little
more than a joke -- who would follow them? Taiwan is ruled in totality
by a different government, calling itself the Republic of China, more
democratic than PRC. Yes, PRC intimidates ROC with military might, but
if you break Taiwanese provincial law (as in, province of PRC) in
Taiwan, nobody cares. If you told someone in Taiwan "Oh my that's
against the law made by the People's Assembly of the Province of
Taiwan! I will call the police and they shall arrest you!", they would
just laugh.
Transnistria is in a somewhat similar situation; the main difference
is that Taiwan is recognised by a few dozen countries (but not all!)
and Transnistria is recognised by none... well, that's not entirely
true, they're fully recognised by South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and
Nagorno-Karabakh, with all of whom they maintain friendly relations.
Yet... the names of these nations may not be familiar to you for good
reason. They all recognise each other, but how many UN members
recognise any of them? Nagorno-Karabakh is recognised by only Armenia
among UN members, but they have that at least. One could argue thus
that Armenia, by recognising Nagorno-Karabakh's independence,
legitimises by proxy the claims to independence of all countries
recognised only by Nagorno-Karabakh... but that's not really relevant.
not recognized in the world.If my neighbor suddenly
decides to have the
official language written using chinese symbols that doesn't mean it has to
be on the official page of a country's official language. Whatever language
What? The "official page of [Moldova]'s official language"? Wouldn't
that be
http://www.asm.md/institute/lingvist/index.htm rather than
http://mo.wikipedia.org/ ? Moldovan WP is _completely_ unofficial.
Would your country still be able to enforce policies and laws in your
neighbour's house if they declared independence? How many people live
there? Surely not 550 000 people live at his house... that would be a
very large house.
is used there it is not officially recognized and the
ISO code mo stands for
...
the language based on latin alphabet and not cyrillic.
And let's get serious
No, the ISO code stands for "Moldovan". It doesn't specify a script.
Similarly, "ku" is for Kurdish, it doesn't say Arabic or Latin
alphabet, or "az" for Azeri, or any other language written with
different alphabets.
most of the people from the Transdn. region either
know Romanian and write
it properly or don't know it at all.
Write it _properly_? That's a bit of an oversight on your part. After
all, 200 years ago, Romanian was ALWAYS written in Cyrillic, and then
not due to Soviet pressure because the USSR didn't exist then.
I don't think it's "improper" to write English in Chinese characters.
Unconventional, perhaps, but certainly not improper. If English using
Chinese characters is made the official language in Texas, it makes
perfect sense to me for en.wiki to use both scripts.
And what you say sounds to me like that: There is a
country A that has the
official language as english. Then there's a country/region B that adopts
english also as their language but written in morse code, so they modify the
en.wikipedia.org's main page to have a pleasant interface combined of both
and a warm welcome "If you want it in latin script click here" and "..
..-.
/ -.-- --- ..- / .-- .- -. - / .. - / .. -. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-.
--- -.. . / -.-. .-.. .. -.-. -.- / .... . .-. . .-.-.-". Wonderful idea,
no ? This is exactly the current situation with mo.wiki
And what exactly is wrong with that?
If you still want to have some weird language, no
problem, invent your own
name for it (not derived from mo) and put it on wiki, just don't use our
official "mo".
"mo" doesn't belong to you. It doesn't _belong_ to anybody. Just ask
the ISO commission. ISO codes don't belong to anybody. They specify
something. This specifies "Moldovan language". When you say Moldovan
language, that doesn't automatically specify how to write it.
Similarly, I could specify a webpage as "en" according to ISO code,
but use Arabic letters, as long as it was used to record the English
language.
Mark
--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin