[Wikipedia-l] Why MO.wikipedia. - Moldovan, are written in cyrillic ?

Mon Dec 5 09:52:32 UTC 2005

> You probably don't know the history of the language well. In fact both
> Romanian and Moldovans has been Orthodox Christians and used Cyrillic
> script for several ages. The modern Latin script is relatively a news
> in both lands. So one can's speak in such a self-confindent way about
> Moldovan Cyrillics as "decreed in the unfree days". By the way, do you
> know much about the unfree days? They were not totally that "unfree".
> :) Be more neutral. ;)

For some reason, Slavic people seem to think that "Romania is really just a
Slavic language that has only recently tried to affirm itself as
Latin/Romance". Not only you, but others as well. Romanian, while influenced
by Slavic languages to a degree, is still overwhelmingly Romance and the
Latin alphabet is the best alphabet to represent it. Additionally, it
switched from Cyrillic *in the 1800s*. That's a long time ago! So modern
Latin script in Romania is not recent, especially relative to Moldova.
Additionally, Latin script is the *only* script used to write Romanian in
Romania. It's just like French is always written in Latin script, Romanian
is also always written in Latin script. Therefore, it's not OK to justify
the writing of Moldovan in Cyrillic just because Romanian was once written
in Cyrillic. It's true, Romanian national revival only came about in the
second half of the 19th century, and until then Romanians mostly used
Cyrillic, albeit a different form. But today, the Latin alphabet is the only
alphabet used in Romania.

Another point is the use of Cyrillic in Moldova. From what I gather - from
the media, from Moldovans - Moldova today is overwhelmingly Latin-script.
Aside from the disputed territory of Transnistria, very few people use
Cyrillic often.

>  - This gives the Moldovan internet user a bad impression of Wikipedia and
> irritates him or her because they can think that Wikipedia ignores what the
> independent nation of Moldova decides and rather goes by the standard from
> the Soviet era.
>
> Maybe it would be a good choice just to move the whole thing to
> __mo-cyr.wikipedia.org__, leaving at [[:mo:]] the two links -- to the
> Romanian and to the old-fashioned Cyrillic-written Moldovan.
>
> Sl.

Yes, that's a good idea.