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

[Mark Williamson]

It's more complex than that I think.

"mo" was deleted from the list of ISO codes relatively recently; when
the Wiki was created it was a valid ISO code.

Now, "ro" applies to "Romanian", for which Moldovan is supposed to be
an alternative name, however it seems inappropriate (although it may
be technically correct at this point, the abrupt deletion of the code
has mixed up my mind a lot) to call it a Romanian Wikipedia.

As far as Peter's e-mail goes: there are no exact statistics, I don't
think, for such political ideas however as of the last census, the
majority reported speaking Moldovan (rather than Romanian); in the
cities this was reversed however (as I recall). Electoral politics can
also be a rough indicator of opinion and in that regard those who are
Romanophiles and those who are Russophiles or independentists seem to
be about equal in number. Whether or not Moldovans and Romanians are
the same "people" and whether the language should be called Romanian
or Moldovan is a hot topic in the country and a source of much
contention.

Also, the majority of Moldovans seems to be against union with Romania
despite the fact that this would very likely be in their interests
economically. I am certainly no expert on Hungary by any means but
obviously the end of the Soviet era has left very differing results. I
believe the opinion towards Russia and Russification in Poland is
almost the opposite as that in Belarus, it's unreasonable to fit every
country to the same mold. Some in Moldova still yearn for the old days
of the USSR, and I can understand why they would in their case - they
are currently the poorest country in Europe (besides Kosovo, if you
consider it a country) and are really struggling. There are certainly
those who, while they may not have been big fans of all Soviet
policies, are nostalgic for many aspects of the era.

Like I said, it is a complex issue. Also, from what I have heard (and
this may be incorrect), the US Library of Congress deleted the MO code
without consulting with any Moldovan authority which seems
inappropriate. Imagine the outcry if those "experts" were to delete
SR, HR, and BS codes in favor of SH without consulting any local
authority?

Mark

On 9/1/09, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Andrew
> Turvey<andrewrturvey at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> - The iso code for Romanian/Moldavian is ro. "mo", which was the ISO code
>> for Moldavian in the Cyrillic script is now deprecated. There is no ISO
>> code for Cyrillic script Moldavian.
>
> ISO 639 codes are about languages, not scripts. The code "ro" would
> apply to both scripts.
>
>> - Where ISO 639-1 codes exist we use them to name the Wikipedia. However,
>> we do have other encyclopedias for languages which don't have ISO codes.
>> Examples are http://ang.wikipedia.org - the Anglo Saxon encyclopedia which
>> uses some non-latin characters (e.g. Ƿ for "th")
>
> In those cases, when available, we use an ISO 639-3 code. All our
> 3-letter language names are ISO 639-3 codes with the exception of
> als:, which should probably be moved to gsw:. If there is also no ISO
> 639-3 code, a code is used of the form xxx-yyy, where xxx is the code
> for the language, or if no clear language applies, the language group
> to which the 'language' belongs, and yyy is some sort of denotation.
> existing examples are be-x-old with a language, zh-minnan with a
> metalanguage and roa-rup and fiu-vro with a language group.
>
>> - mo.wp should be moved to something other than "mo" - perhaps mocy?
>
> I don't know the rules for this, but I would expect it to be either
> ro-cyr or ro-x-cyr
>
>> - Finally, I don't see any reason why the community can't address with
>> this issue by discussion and consensus. There's no need for the foundation
>> to get involved, at least at this stage.
>
> The foundation holds technical control over the wikipedia domains;
> nothing can be done but by the foundation to for example rename a
> wiki.
>
>
> --
> André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
>
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