I say Myanmar, you say Burma
Mark Mandel
thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Wed May 7 13:22:27 UTC 2008
On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 6:01 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> If they didn't have such a tin ear, they would have renamed the place
> "Ukrainia," given fact that, in Ukrainian, there's no way to
> distinguish between "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine." The "distinction" is
> peculiar to English (and to various other articulated languages, of
> course).
ISTR the argument that the origin of the word was a common noun that
meant something like "borderland", which is how the article got into
the English name. The Ukrainian government reasoned that their country
was not a borderland, especially now that it was independent again.
--
Mark Mandel
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