Moldavian (was: Contributions by Steve Long)

[Adam Hyllested]

On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:

> witness the overnight extinction
> of language with 2 1/2 Mio. speakers recently. Cannot happen ? Has
> happened: Moldavian;

In the case of Moldavian, we're dealing with a language that was also
CONSTRUCTED overnight, and those languages are probably more likely to
face extinction. In fact, the Soviet language planners could have done
their job much better; they never took advantage of the actual
phonological differences between standard Romanian and the dialects of
Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic. The cyrillic alphabet introduced
for Moldavian in 1940 was actually a grapheme-to-grapheme correspondence
to the roman alphabet used for standard Romanian, very much like the
relationship Croatian vs. Serbian during the Yugoslav era. And only a few
loanwords from Russian and Ukrainian, most of them already used in the
area, replaced standard Romanian words in the official Moldavian
vocabulary. Examples are Mold. <hulub> 'pigeon' (from Ukr.) vs. Rom.
<porumbel>, Mold. <drujba`> 'friendship' (from Russ.) vs. Rom.
<prietenie>.

After Moldova's independence in 1991, the question of whether the official
language should be called ROMANIAN or MOLDOVIAN rocked its political
cradle. In Moldova's present constitution, the official language is called
MOLDOVIAN, but it is acknowledged as a variety of Romanian, and Moldovian
has even followed the recent Romanian spelling reform.

Best regards,
Adam Hyllested