Moldavian (was: Contributions by Steve Long)

Ralf-Stefan Georg Georg at home.ivm.de
Thu Oct 14 09:05:40 UTC 1999


>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.

Thanks for these useful additions, of course the fact that this language
was created overnight is instrumental in its overnight "extinction"; what
always struck me most about Soviet attutudes towards this language was the
fact that even the most authoritative accounts of M. (e.g. Jazyki Narodov
SSSR) always (correctly ;-) included M. in the Romance family of lgs., but
that any statement to the effect that it might, within this family, be
particularly close to Romanian, was carefully avoided. This bordered on
hysteria. A useful account of all this is to be found in Donald L. Dryer:
Moldavian Linguistic Realities on pp. 234-253 in the proc. of the 4th conf.
on Non-Slavic Languages of the USSR, Columbus/O: Slavica 1994. The status
of Moldavian has been the subject of other interesting papers in earlier
conference volumes, one of which was entitled: "How non-Romanian is
Moldavian ?", closing with the dictum: "Barely." No, sorry, I forgot the
author and publishing-date of this one.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32



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