[Foundation-l] mo.wikipedia

[Neil Harris]

Marco Chiesa wrote:
> Neil Harris wrote:
>
>   
>> As an outsider to this argument, I know little other than what I have 
>> read on the mailing list and in articles, so I apologise in advance for 
>> any inaccuracies, but I think it goes something like this:
>>
>> To a close approximation, Moldovan == Romanian, but written in Cyrillic, 
>> and is used in Moldova and Transnistria, which border Romania, and are 
>> closely historically and culturally related.  There are considerably 
>> fewer mo: speakers (3.4 M in Rep. Moldova, 0.5M in Transnistria) than 
>> ro: speakers (24 M).
>>
>> See [[Moldovan language]] for details.
>>  
>>
>>     
>
> As far I understand: Moldovan is written in Cyrillic only in 
> Transnistria, while the rest of Moldova switched to the Latin script 
> after gaining independence from the USSR; the Moldovan government states 
> that the official language is called Moldovan, and it's the same 
> language both in Moldova and Transnistria. Therefore, most of  the 
> Moldovan-speaking people have used Latin script for at least 15 years. 
> For this reason, they don't think it is correct that the wikipedia 
> called Moldovan uses Cyrillic. I understand they are ok to say Moldovan 
> and Rumanian are the same language.
>
>
>   

Yes, I'd forgotten that the Moldovans shifted back to the Latin 
alphabet. In which case, I can refine the suggestion a bit:

ro: and mo: should then share databases, and an auto-transliterating 
dual-script front end as in zh:, but the Cyrillic part of the interface 
should be disabled completely whenever accessed via the ro: domain name. 
Even when accessed via mo:, it should always default to the Latin 
alphabet (thus making the 27M Latin-script-using Moldovans and Romanians 
happier), at the cost of making the 0.5M Transnistrians, and a small 
minority of older Cyrillic-script-using Moldovans, slightly less happy 
than they would have been otherwise.

A possible spin on this approach: by getting the Transnistrians to share 
the same back-end DB, you could argue to nationalist Romanians that the 
Transnistrians are thus being drawn into the wider Romanian-language 
cultural sphere, whilst at the same time you could argue to nationalist 
Transnistrians that their own language/writing system combination is 
being given first-class support, without having the Latin script forced 
on them... so everybody's happy. Or am I being hopelessly unrealistic? 
(Yes. Of course I am.)

Do we have any actual Romanians, Moldovans or Transnistrians on this 
list who can give an opinion on this?

-- Neil