2008/11/13 Dan Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
