Re: Romanian and Cyrillic

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Wed Apr 28 2004 - 05:16:32 EDT

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: Croatian"

    On Tuesday, April 27, 2004 9:25 PM Peter Constable va escriure:

    > Since we're talking about Romanian...
    >
    > Prior to 1991, the Soviet-controlled administration attempted to
    > create a distinct linguistic identity, Moldovian, which as I
    > understand it basically amounted to Romanian written in Cyrillic
    > script. (They tried to introduce some archaic Romanian forms and
    > Russian loans, but apparently none of it stuck.)

    This even succeeds in getting a distinct identifier in ISO 639, mo, under a
    slightly different name: "Moldavian".

    Nowadays, it is written (in Moldova and Transdniestria) in Latin script,
    however. I remember it was one of the first thing that did the recent
    Moldavian authorities back in 1991: switching from Cyrillic to Latin.

    It is interessant to note that Microsoft did not endorse ISO 639 on this
    regard, but sees Moldavian as being a form of Romanian, and asks for use of
    "ro-mo" for the identifier corresponding to LangId x0818.
    <URL:http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script
    56/html/vsmsclcid.asp>.

    > How relevant is Romanian in Cyrillic script at this point?

    I believe the same answer that the one I did about Croatian would apply. But
    this issue is even muddier for the reason of the existence of the "mo" code.
    Because, strictly speaking, what you are asking for is about existing of
    Romanian material, not originating from Moldova or Transdniestria, written
    in Cyrillic, and which _cannot_ be tagged as Moldavian but _should_ be
    tagged in Romanian. Pretty rare, I would say.

    Antoine



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