"The" Philippines

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:17 PM -0600 3/30/05, Jim Parish wrote:
>Michael McKernan wrote:
>>  I don't know about The Hague
>
>The Dutch name is "'s-Gravenhage", or "Den Haag" for short; literally
>something like "the Count's Hedge" (i.e., the woods surrounding the
>principal residence of the Count of Holland). Is there a term for the act
>of turning a definite (but common) noun phrase into a proper noun?
>
>Jim Parish

Strawson (1952, IIRC) describes such phrases "growing capital
letters"; his example was either "the Bank of England" or "the Church
of England", I forget which.

Larry