[Foundation-l] 31 august, 20 years of our national holiday "Our romanian language" in Moldova, mo.wikipedia still in cyrillic !

[Peter Gervai]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 04:10, Mark Williamson<node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it is fair to say that no language "belongs" to a country, it
> belongs to all speakers... what about the hundreds of thousands of
> people who write Moldovan in Cyrillic?

According to Wikipedia (the enciclopaedia libre of the internet, did
you know that? ;)) article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language:

The standard alphabet is Latin (currently official in the Republic of
Moldova). Before 1989, also two versions of Cyrillic had been used:
the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet in 1940-89, and the historical Romanian
Cyrillic alphabet until 1857. As of 2008[update], the former remains
in use only in Transnistria.

This suggests that
1) language identification 'mo' is written in latin,
2) it _is_ the _moldovan_ language,
3) it is used by 90% of the population (4 million+).

This hints to me as well that there is a language, which is the same,
but written in cyrillic script and used in Transnistria (400 000+
people), but:
1) I do not know its ISO code (definitely not "mo"),
2) I do not remember the policy to host the same language in different
scripts, but if we support that, we should follow the already applied
naming convention (I tend to remember something similar about serbian
wp?)

> Also I'm curious what Geni feels about them - using "mo" to refer to
> Cyrillic Moldovan is not, in my view, "inaccurate", although it is not
> as specific as perhaps it sh/could be.

It discriminates 90% of the speakers against 10% of the speakers, so I
would call it "inaccurate" as well.

I can understand the frustration of the original poster, based on
these facts. Especially since I'm well aware that that region is full
of national pride, even if it ends in violence. Hot headed people. :-)
-- 
 byte-byte,
    grin