"the" before country name
Benjamin Barrett
gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM
Mon May 12 03:12:06 UTC 2008
Ghana, I think, still goes back and forth. There are others. BB
On May 11, 2008, at 7:20 PM, Katharine The Grate wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Katharine The Grate <KatharineTheGrate at COMCAST.NET>
> Subject: Re: "the" before country name
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> People used to say "the Congo".
>>
>> But "the United States of America" is just the formal political
>> name of =
>> the American state, and the formal political name typically is
>> preceded =
>> by "the." E.g., the Commonwealth of Australia, the Kingdom of
>> Belgium, =
>> the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Union
>> of =
>> Soviet Socialist Republics. There may or may not be a
>> corresponding =
>> country name that can be used without "the"; there was none, for =
>> example, with the Soviet Union (only Russia, which for political
>> reasons =
>> could not be used as such until the Soviet Union's dissolution).
>> =20
>>
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list