Definite articles

[William Ryan]

Dear Dean,
Your point about civil behaviour and calling people by the name they
prefer is
well made and taken. I would not dream of insulting my Ukrainian friends
and acquaintances and do not believe I have. But I should like to take
your point further, and in passing deal with one or two issues raised by
other contributors.

I think your analogy is not apt. If your friend Robert had told you he
would no longer respond to that name because he had been told it was
insulting and implied he was a robot, would you not try to persuade him
that his etymology was deficient, and that his decision would not only
distort his family history and cause his friends considerable
irritation, but also create complications with the revenue department,
telephone books etc.?

And the civility argument must surely work both ways: it is not
unreasonable for me and others to dislike being told how to speak
English by those who are not native English speakers. I accept that
English and American ears probably hear differently in this matter - the
ethnic balance of our respective communities is different - but to my
ear a sentence such as 'We are off to Ukraine' can only be spoken
credibly with a broad Yorkshire or Lancashire accent. I also feel that I
have a right to object when
the reason for the ban on 'the' given by several correspondents is not
only totally and demonstrably wrong but suggests that I am a racist
(callous was one word used), colonial oppressor, great power hegemonist
etc., which I most vigorously deny. And may one ask what
politically-correct words Ukrainians now use for Germans and Romanians
(the word which the English-speaking world is now obliged to use but
still, interestingly enough, seems to pronounce as Rumanian)?

Your analogy is not apt in another way; this is not about the names of
individuals or even a whole people but about an official place name and
involves all sorts of issues which concern me as a lexicographer,
historian, librarian, and editor. Place names involve all sorts of
sometimes conflicting conventions - an area of where language and
linguistics collides with bureaucracy and politics, reference works,
global communications etc. English-language atlas and map publishers
nowadays tend to use local
names on maps with the conventional English name following if there is
one; on the other hand editorial convention in publishing usually
insists on the use of English conventional names where they exist (in
the area of city names the logic of this is Kiev, but Lviv; Munich but
Munchen Gladbach, Florence but Urbino); these are both rational
conventions even if they go in opposite directions. Current diplomatic
convention allows states to declare their preferred form of name, and
this is normally followed for official purposes but very patchily by the
press and publishers. Last Friday the London Evening Standard had a
short report which had 'Ukraine' in the headline (another area of
special convention) but 'the Ukraine' in the text of the report. To
upset these conventions, which historically develop slightly differently
from
spoken language and for more easily determinable reasons, is a matter of
some consequence. Language follows its own rules; conventions are made
by us for the common good (one hopes).

The case for dropping 'the' in the English designation of the Ukraine
would be persuasive if there was indeed some pejorative connotation in
this usage (as, for example, with the peoples formerly called Samoed by
the Russians). But there is no such connotation, indeed the definite
article in other contexts often carries some cachet. I cannot find a
single English name of a country which includes the definite article in
which the article bears the slightest pejorative colouring or implies
subordination to another country, or even past subordination. The common
usage in English is in fact quite varied and has changed over time, as
one would expect, but it is true that the tendency is for the article to
disappear from the relatively few single-word names which previously had
it. In newer state names the article tends to go with composite names
(THE United States, THE Republic of ...), but there are many exceptions
such as those involving compass points or directions (North Korea, New
Zealand, Outer Mongolia,
Upper Volta). The United Kingdom has an article but Great Britain is
article-less, and for some places one has a choice: I see both Gambia
and The Gambia in holiday brochures. Other categories which may attract
the article are names which are grammatically plurals (typically
archipelegos such as the Philippines, but note Indonesia) or derived
from plurals (the Netherlands, not a federal state but a kingdom since
1813). A further category is names of regions or territories which have
become state names; these seem to favour coastal and riparian regions
(the Argentine (now almost obsolete), the Congo, the Gold Coast, the
Transvaal (a state for a while), but note Upper Volta). But not all
regional names attract the article (THE Levant but Siberia) even when
they appear to be similar coinages: THE Transvaal, but Transylvania.
This is the category into which the Ukraine falls - 'ukraina' in
Ukrainian and Russian meant a border area, not necessarily a specific
one (in the 17th century Kotoshikhin used it for the Tatar border area)
- but the derivation of a state name from a regional name can hardly be
thought of as demeaning: Great Britain, Germany (as we call
Deutschland), Italy, the Netherlands,
Finland, Russia, to name just a few of many, were all regional names or
names of ethno-linguistic areas before they became states.

Why did the Ukraine  attract the definite article in English, just in
case there really is something pejorative in the English usage? A quick
search shows that the word Ukrainian is not recorded before the
nineteenth century in England. My suspicion is that English knowledge of
the Ukraine in the eighteenth century would have been very limited,
vague, and largely confined to educated circles who would have derived
their knowledge primarily from German-language sources, since Germans
were prominent in scientific description of the Russian empire. I think
English 'the Ukraine' is most probably a calque of German 'die Ukraine'
(any better ideas gratefully received). Exactly what territory was
denoted by this term would of course have depended on the date. I have
an English map of the Russian Empire and Poland published in the 1720's
which shows a very small area labelled as 'Ukrain' (a precedent perhaps
for dropping the definite article). But in this case the map had been
revised by Captain John Perry who had first hand knowledge of travel and
the geography of the Russian empire and would have taken the
name directly from Russian.

This brings me to my last point. When publishers and editors in North
America censor 'the' from the Ukraine, is this rule retroactive? Can we
use 'the Ukraine' for periods when the various territories now included
in present-day Ukraina WERE a region in a larger political entity, in
fact two or three larger political entities? Do we now say Left-bank
Ukraine or THE Left-bank Ukraine? Do we not run the danger of
anachronism?

Sorry I have let this reply develop into an essay. My wife says I am
becoming boring on this topic, so I shall try to make no more
contributions.

Will

Dean Worth wrote:
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>         Re the "the" the discussion about (the) Ukraine seems to me to be on the
> wrong level: it has nothing to do with grammatical rules, and everything to
> do with simple good manners. I have a friend named Robert Winter, and he
> prefers to be called Robert, not Bob, so I call him Robert, which costs me
> but a single extra syllable once a month or so. If our Ukrainian friends
> and colleagues prefer to refer to their country as Ukraine, without the
> article, why can't we do it their way, just to be obliging? After all, it's
> not as if they were asking for Saskatchewan. Dean Worth
>
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W. F. Ryan, MA, DPhil, FBA, FSA
Warburg Institute (School of Advanced Study, University of London)
Woburn Square, LONDON  WC1H 0AB
tel: 020 7862 8940 (direct)
tel: 020 7862 8949 (switchboard)
fax: 020 7862 8939
Institute Webpage  fttp://www.sas.ac.uk/warburg/
##################################################################

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