On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
I translated the article from Russian Wikipedia so you can see more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_orthography_reform_of_1933
My impression is that the difference between be and be-x-old is almost purely political. The difference between the two spellings is not bigger than between US and UK English.
I'm not blaming any side, because both of them present valid points. The fact that there are two Wikipedias for this language is particularly saddening, because it is in a rather problematic situation to start with. While the sr/hr/bs/sh Wikipedia are all (arguably) written in the same language with several spelling standards, the language itself is undoubtedly out of any danger of extinction, no matter what name you call it. Belarusian, on the other hand, is under pressure from Russian. So in the case of Wikipedia, instead of trying to understand which Wikipedia they should write and read, many writers and readers who know the Belarusian language, simply go to the Russian Wikipedia, so both be and be-x-old develop very slowly.
I would be very glad to see paragraph 3 of the language policy ("different written forms") enforced in this case and these two Wikipedias merged.