* Marcus Buck <wiki(a)marcusbuck.org> [Sun, 03 Oct 2010 19:39:39 +0200]:
If you are interested in the facts:
There are 19.7 million speakers of Romanian in Romania. There are 2.6
million speakers of Romanian in Moldova (they call their language
either
Romanian or Moldovan, but it's the same language
as in Romania). Both
Romania and Moldova write the language with Romanian script. Then
there
are 177,000 speakers of Romanian living in
Transnistria. Transnistria
is
officially part of Moldova, but it is a de facto
independant state.
Transnistria's population is about one third Romanian, one third
Russian
and one third Ukrainian. When Moldova became
independant in 1991 the
Russian group in Transnistria feared that their privileged status
would
change and that Romanian would become the most
privileged language in
the new state. A civil war broke out and supported by Russian troops
Transnistria became a de facto independant state. This state holds
Russophile policies and the Romanian language (called Moldovan) is
written in Cyrillic. The Cyrillic script was introduced by the Soviets
as a measure of cultural Sovietization.
Cyrillic scripts were there well before Soviet Union existed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Cyrillic_alphabet
Although, the Soviet Union used the modified version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_Cyrillic_alphabet
I am not about to defend it. But saying that Cyrillic was not there
before FSU is not true.
Dmitriy