"The" Philippines

[Dave Wilton]

> > Spanish tends to use the definite article with the name of any country
> > (although that may be somewhat abandoned these days, particularly in
> > the
> > case of Spain itself).  When I lived in Ecuador, we always said 'el
> > Ecuador' and 'el Peru', even 'el Argentina' and 'el China', cuz
> > countries
> > are masculine (patria =fatherland).
>
> "patria = fatherland"
>
> I don't think that this fact supports the claim that "countries are
> masculine." "Patria" does mean "fatherland," but its own grammatical
> gender is feminine. There's no necessary connection between the
> grammatical gender of a word and its so-called "natural" gender.
> Certainly, there's no necessary connection between grammatical gender
> and natural gender among the members of a semantic set such as the
> random, unpredictable names of countries.
>
> -Wilson Gray

And there is the Russian "motherland" and the English "mother country."

--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net
  http://www.wilton.net


>