[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] mo.wikipedia.org when will you stop making joke of us ?

Thu Nov 13 22:17:18 UTC 2008

2008/11/13 Dan Collins <en.wp.st47 at gmail.com>:
> Really? By hosting a wiki in moldovan that uses the same language, but
> a different writing style than you happen to prefer, we're supporting
> russia? What evil communists we are! We should be drawn and quartered.
> Why are we allowed to live? Quick, sue us! Clamp us in irons!
>
> Yes, such idiocy from people who actually believe that is painful.
>

Sigh. I understand that eastern European conflicts are likely a closed
book to you. Perhaps fortunate since otherwise we would have had a
hard time pretending they didn't exist for the last decade or so.

Still there are a number of things that should be considered. There
isn't really any such language as Moldovan. At most it is a dialect of
Romanian. This is largely uncontroversial in the west but Russia spent
about 50 years trying to claim otherwise.

The alphabet used to write it is a deeply political and nationalist
act. Romanian is written in the Latin script and thus that was the
scrip used in Moldova prior to soviet occupation. As part of soviet
policy during the cold war an attempt was made to de-Romanianise
Moldova and enforce a new national identity on Moldova. While there
were various expressions of this the Cyrillic is perhaps one of the
most obvious.

Anyway as you may know the soviet union feel and the newly independent
nations emerged understandably looking to throw off their soviet past.
As part of that there was a general rejection of the soviet
manufactured Moldovian national identity. This includes the use of
Cyrillic text which is now not used outside the breakaway region of
Transnistria.

The upshot of this is that describing by cyrillic Romanian as
Moldavian you are effectively supporting the otherwise discredited
soviet version of the Moldavian national identity. Given the
conditions under which this was enforced it is understandable that
people might be a little upset.

-- 
geni