Countries with 'the'

Josh Lalonde   Tue Apr 24, 2007 3:36 am GMT
Some countries' names always have 'the' in front of them. I think British speakers use it for some countries that North Americans don't. These are the ones that I can think of now:
the UK
the US (but America with no 'the')
the Netherlands
the Bahamas
lots of other things that are groups of islands (the Virgin Islands, the Solomon Islands, etc.
These are some that I don't tend to use, but I've heard other people say:
the Sudan
the Lebanon
the Gambia
Presley.   Tue Apr 24, 2007 4:10 am GMT
If you think about it, it makes sense grammatically to put an article before some of them. For instance, if you broke down "The United Kingdom", "Kingdom" would be a noun, and "United" would serve as the adjective. It makes perfect sense to put "The" at the beginning.

However, like you said, there are some that don't seem to make as much sense. Some fun ones are "The Ukraine" or "The Philipines". I don't know, maybe they do make sense in their own way and I'm just ignorant of it. If I was a gambling man, I would totally bet money that that is the case.
Jim   Tue Apr 24, 2007 4:11 am GMT
"The Congo" and then there's "The Ukraine" which as I recall once reading had the "The" added by The USSR (there's another) to belittle it.
Lazar   Tue Apr 24, 2007 5:47 am GMT
Yeah, the article seems to be used when the name is a political construct (for example, the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union, as well as nearly all official names: "The Republic/Kingdom of Somewhere") or when the name is plural (for example, the Netherlands and many island groups).

Or instead of saying "political construct", we could simply say that the article is used when an otherwise common noun is used as a name: "republic, kingdom, states, etc."

An article generally isn't used when a geographic name is modified by an adjective, as in "Great Britain", "West Virginia", "Upper Saxony", "British Columbia", or "French Polynesia".

In the case of (the) Gambia, I think it's because the country was named specifically after the Gambia River, so officially its the Republic of the Gambia [River]. But the urge to simplify is just to great: we've got precedent for other riverine states without articles, like Mississippi; and furthermore, "Gambia" looks like a neo-Latin feminine noun, typical for country names.

In cases like (the) Sudan and (the) Ukraine, I think the article was historically used to signify that the noun in question was a region, rather than a country per se. "Sudan", for example, originally referred to a large of Africa stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea: for example, Mali was originally called French Soudan (although for some reason, nobody seems to use the article for that specific name). It just happened that one specific area, the former Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, was left as the only state bearing the name "Sudan". As for (the) Ukraine, I read that "Ukraine" means "frontier" or "borderland", so I can see how it was interpreted as more of a "thing" than a country. (Of course, in the East Slavic languages this would all be a non-issue, because they don't use articles.)

One interesting thing is that during the Imperial period, people tended to have a much broader definition of "Russia". Russia, as an ethnic domain, was considered to encompass all of the East Slavic areas, with the Belarus being "White Russia", Ukraine being "Little Russia", and Russia as we know it today being "Great Russia". By the time of the Great War, though, it seems as if the term "Ukraine" was becoming popular in English. Belarus continued be called White Russia or Byelorussia until the fall of the USSR; know it's known by the native term Belarus, which technically means "White Ruthenia" rather than "White Russia". But I digress.
Lazar   Tue Apr 24, 2007 5:51 am GMT
"to great" should be "too great". Substituting "to" for "too" actually seems to be the most common spelling error that I make when typing spontaneously. (I've made this error in a bunch of other posts, but in most cases I've noticed it and corrected it before posting.)
Lazar   Tue Apr 24, 2007 5:54 am GMT
Actually, Google searches seem to show that the article *was* normally used with "French Sudan". My bad.
Lazar   Tue Apr 24, 2007 5:59 am GMT
In my first post I accidentally used the French spelling "Soudan".

Also, I forgot to mention that that tripartite Russia thing is the basis of the term "Tsar of All the Russias".
Lazar   Tue Apr 24, 2007 6:02 am GMT
And in my first post I accidentally typed "the Belarus". Sorry for the obsessive correcting. ;-)
24NO   Tue Apr 24, 2007 9:24 am GMT
You'll note too that it tends to be "Ukraine" rather than "The Ukraine" these days: a nod to its status as a post-Soviet Union independent state.
Uriel   Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:30 am GMT
Yeah, I've noticed that I grew up with "the Sudan" and "the Ukraine" but now the "the" has been dropped. Those names still sound weird to me without it, though.

Call me old-fashioned, I guess.

There are a lot of regions that traditionally have "the" in front of them. Deserts, especially -- the Sahara, the Kalahari, the Gila. You don't even need to say "Desert" after those! Less well-known deserts require the full treatment, though -- you would never say "the Sonoran" or "the Chihuahuan". You can say "the Atacama" though, I think.

Rivers get the same treatment -- you can simply call them the Amazon, the Danube, the Mississippi, the Volga, the Nile, the Little Bighorn. You just can't do that with names that are adjectives -- you have to say the Red River, the Russian River, the Yellow River.
Humble   Thu Apr 26, 2007 5:29 am GMT
Yeah,
articles with geographical names are (is??) learners' headache.
Well done,Lazar, a nice ample explanation. I'd only disagree on Belarus -the meaning was not meant to be changed, it didn't matter.
After the disintegration of the USSR some republics changed their names so that they sound in their national language. Bashkiriya became Bashkortostan, Byelorussia - Belarus. It was a linguistic way to raise their heads high.
David   Sun Apr 29, 2007 2:19 pm GMT
Well, although there is no article in Russian and Ukrainian, so calling it "the Ukraine" or "Ukraine" doesn't have a parallel in those languages, there is the issue of how to say "in the Ukraine": it was traditionally na Ukraine - na meaning "on" insteading of using v "in" as would be normal with languages. But then the government wanted people to say v Ukraine, but most people have already gone back to na Ukraine...
Humble   Mon Apr 30, 2007 8:10 am GMT
Right, David,
I myself was struck when in the early 90s they started correcting people who said "na".
You ascribe the preposition change to politics, too? If it's so, it's ridiculous, isn't it? I've always said "na" and I will.