On 03/12/05, Field Nothing fieldtheory2@hotmail.com wrote:

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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

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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