'the' in country names

[Lynne Murphy]

Forgive me if this comes twice--computer weirdness.

'The United States' isn't really comparably to 'the Ukraine'.  It's part of
two patterns of place names that take 'the':  plural names (e.g. the
Netherlands) and government-descriptive names ('the Republic of Ireland',
'the Federated States of Micronesia', 'the United Kingdom', 'the Soviet
Union', etc.).

Many of the other 'the' land-place names (including countries) are named
after rivers, and rivers always take 'the' as part of their proper names
(e.g. 'the Mississippi').  The US and the UK differ in the prevalence of
the 'the' in some of these: The Lebanon, The Gambia, The Congo. There's
also The Sudan, which isn't a river but a savannah. (Someone else mentioned
'the Ghana'--I think they may have been mixing this up with Gambia.)  The
'the' country names in these cases seem to have undergone this semantic
process:  river --> region around river (as described by colonialists,
usually) --> independent country.  When I first came to the UK, I found
'The Gambia' to sound very imperialistic, so I sympathize with the
Ukrainian who takes offense at 'the Ukraine'.

I blogged about this last year:

<http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/04/gambia-lebanon-etc.html>

Lynne


--On Sunday, May 11, 2008 8:31 pm -0400 "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>
wrote:

> 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).
> We say America, not the America.  (I put aside for now the ambiguity of
> "America," which can refer either to the USA or to North and South
> America.)  The Netherlands and (formerly) the Ukraine are the only
> examples of country names with "the" that come to mind.  The
> Netherlanders also choose to call their seat of government The Hague,
> which always struck me as even more anomalous.
>
> John Baker
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Mark Mandel
> Sent: Sun 5/11/2008 3:25 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "the" before country name
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 12:11 AM, Your Name <ROSESKES at aol.com> wrote:
>
>> If "the" before a country's name is belittling, why is there not one
>> single American objecting to "the United States"?
>>
>> Rosemarie
>
>
> Because we chose that name ourselves? And consequently it describes us as
> we want to see ourselves, rather than as 'the border territory'?
>
> --
> Mark Mandel
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> <http://www.americandialect.org/>



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com


Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org