The names of most countries don’t feel like they need definite articles, but some do. Like, somebody in English would say “I’m traveling to the Philippines.” but “I’m traveling to Philippines.” sounds wrong. The same phenomenon happens with the Netherlands. I think it also occurs with the Congo (although the distinction between the DRC and Congo-Brazzaville makes this one weird) and it used to occur with “the” Ukraine. But nobody ever talks about “the France” or “the Japan”, so why do some proper nouns take the definite article and others not?
These are two different use cases.
The Philippines is called the Philippines because it is an archipelago. Groups of islands that constitute one country often but don’t always take “the” in English: the Maldives, the Bahamas, the Seychelles (examples of ones that don’t are Fiji, Jamaica, Cape Verde).
Ukraine is often called “the Ukraine” because it used to refer to a territory instead of a sovereign country. An example of a similar situation is Lebanon, which was called “the Lebanon“ officially until the end of the second World War. It took several decades for people to consistently drop the article.
But the fact Ukraine was once part of the Russian empire doesn’t fully explain it. I mean, you don’t hear about people talking about “the Wales” just because Wales is part of the UK.
There aren’t hard and fast rules for this sort of thing, but since “Philippines”, “Netherlands” and “United States” all look like plural forms, I think that’s why they get the definite article.
When Ukraine used to be called “The Ukraine”, it’s because “Ukraine” meant “borderlands”. That’s also why the use of the definite article in the country’s name is now considered offensive- it implies that Ukraine isn’t a real country.
I can’t explain “The Lebanon”, “The Yemen”, and so on.
Since Russian doesn't have articles, who added "the" in the first place?
"There arent hard and fast rules for this sort of thing." Yes! Too many of the comments are treating this inconsistent convention like it's a science, when there'll be a group of countries that use the definite for one reason, another that uses it for this reason, and some just as a relic of historical passage, others as an analogy to another name or word, etc. it appears as a single convention, but it's hardly a convention at all!
Nobody has ever given me a good explanation of how the meaning of “borderlands” is perfectly fine but “the borderlands” is terrible. How is “the” the bad guy in the name?
Because the meaning shifted. This word meant “borderlands”, which is an indefinite noun, can put ‘the’. But now the same word means “Ukraine”, a specific country, which is definite, the ‘the’ is not needed anymore. Add to this the political explanation above. By the way, there is only one country which officially has “the” in the name and its singular: The Gambia.
Look it up:
In Ukrainian , the kraina means country and the prefix means in, so it essentially means nation or something along those lines.
In Russian, kraina means edge, and the prefix is something like on, so it implies borderland.
In both Russian and Ukrainian, they do not use definite articles, so the point is moot.
For centuries, Ukraine was treated like a part of Russia, rather than a separate country
I don’t understand why you’re bothered that they want to be called Ukraine, rather than The Ukraine. Call countries what they want to be called.
Let people (and countries) tell you how they like to be addressed. It’s less stress for you to treat others with respect than it is for them to be treated disrespectfully!
It doesn't really matter that the actual difference is very small. What matters is that one side wants it to be one way, and the other deliberately ignores that. There are connotations and implications.
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The best part is neither Russian nor Ukrainian have definite articles so it’s a completely English-centric debate lol
Russian does make a distinction on what preposition to use for Ukraine though, which mirrors the English-language debate. «на Украине» vs. «в Украине».
Which is also a silly debate since there’s even less semantic difference than in English. На Украине is offensive but на работе isn’t?
It's because в is used for countries and на is used for regions within countries generally. For example, if Tatoeba is to be believed, "in the US" is в США whereas "in the (American) Midwest" is на Среднем Западе.
на with place names is used very specifically with places that used to be Russian territory. You'll also hear на Аляске for in Alaska fairly often.
Interesting! Anglo centrism be Anglo centralising lol
If your nickname was Dave, but people insisted on calling you David, wouldn't you be annoyed?
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I think the line of thinking goes:
If you use the definite article, you are talking about specific borderlands. The borderlands of where? The answer is Russia- I don’t think I need to go into why this isn’t a desirable interpretation today.
Whereas if you don’t, it could mean that this area just formerly was borderlands and the name has stuck, but you are not implying that they are borderlands of any particular place.
I think it’s a silly debate FWIW so please don’t come at me on its merits haha.
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You are being deliberately obtuse and I suspect secondary motivations. Some countries are perfectly comfortable with the name of their country including components that etymologically describe some feature of the territory, like the Netherlands, and some aren't. In the former case, that's because the people in the Netherlands have decided they like the name, and aren't annoyed that it's being used by someone else who calls it that because of some controversial historical border-fucking, such as the second world war and Germans.
Ukraine doesn't want to be called the Ukraine because the literal meaning of this is a little too close to how a certain large, controversial, nation regards Ukraine as just a feisty appendage to their own territory, and they are making a point of the independent legitimate nature of their sovereign nation by asking that other people not use that pattern, please.
People are calling it "offensive", but what they really mean is "disrespectful" to the wishes of the Ukrainian people. It's not more complicated than that.
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Try and change your (seemingly limited) perspective and expand your mind further than what you know. How many languages do you speak?
Also are you a neurologist? Wouldn’t it seem obvious to you that languages are completely made up in the brain and whilst grammar is there to sort it out it’s not as clean cut and dry as that and there doesn’t have to be logic. What’s the logic in literally a bunch of sounds? Why do someone languages have a definite article and others don’t?
Also care to explain how it is unsatisfactory lmao
That isn’t an answer to my simple question. You don’t know the answer, so pipe down.
Given that the average Ukrainian likely doesn’t think about the linguistics of their language any more than the average English speaker (in my experience, there’s very few us who actually find this stuff interesting unless you’re specifically in a space for it - like a subreddit or university classes), I’d say it’s probably the MOST relevant analogy if you were to ask a random Ukrainian off the street. It’s just a visceral feeling about “their” name; much like Canadians will make a face if someone calls us American. It really is a lot more like “no, my name is Dave, quit calling me David” than anything.
It’s language. A lot of it is just vibes (and then recording the result of those vibes, of course).
Ukraine is the name of he sovereign nation.
The Ukraine implies it is the borderlands of Russia and not sovereign in its own right.
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Names of countries and ethnicities often have weird origins. They get accepted into the national identity, and it's really up to the people of that nation how we should refer to them.
For example, Japan/Nihon actually does mean the land of the rising sun. That's from the perspective of China, so it's weird they kept it. Canada means "a village" in Iroquois, but nowadays I can map it to ideas like "it takes a village to raise a child" and it generates new meaning.
As for Ukraine, it does seem more like a proper noun without the article. Compare, "President Zelensky" vs "the president"
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Not agreeing or disagreeing on anything, but I just realised the country name "Austria" basically means "eastern borderlands" (of the Roman Empire / HRE).
Thankfully the common name for Austria is just "Austria" in English instead of "the Austria", otherwise we might have some controversies as well on this front.
In German there is a good rule: If the gender of the country is neuter, the "das" gets dropped, unless you add an adjective.
"Schweden ist schön." But "Das schöne Schweden ist im Norden"
In English, it's exactly the same: "Sweden is beautiful" but "The beautiful Sweden is in the north"However, all counties that are female, male or plural, the article is mandatory and surprisingly the list is similar to English:
Die Schweiz, die Ukraine, der Jemen, der Kongo, der Libanon, der Iran, der Irak, die Türkei, die Slowakei, die Mongolei, die Niederlande, die Faröer, ...
I can't draw connections to English, because the genders are lost in old English, And some names are younger. Also genders sometimes shift. But I deeply suspect, that Yemen and Lebanon are so old, that it's the German gender rule. Therefore it has to be a West Germanic gender rule, that became obscure in English. Maybe we could get the etymology of these? Or what does the Dutch language do?
In English it's not exactly the same sorry: "The beautiful Sweden is" might even be rarer than "Beautiful Sweden is". In either case, "The beautiful country of Sweden is" wouldn't sound awkward like the other two might.
well then i have to take back that claim.
I desperately was looking for an old English occurrence of the word Yemen. I hoped that it would occur in the Bible, but no luck so far.
Wiktionary also only gives the Arabic etymology and doesn't indicate, at what time the word became part of the English language.
No worries, I did a quick Ngram search to back up my native speaker sense but it wasn't very fruitful.
Also, there is in fact a "ye men" in the KJV, but I think you're looking for something else 😅
Maybe “the Lebanon” and “the Yemen” are direct translations from Arabic, which uses its definite article with country names?
In Arabic, only a few countries use a definite article. For example, “Lebanon” doesn’t have a definite article in Arabic so “the Lebanon” might be an old English or French name referring to Mount Lebanon, as in “the [mountain of] Lebanon”. Yemen does have a definite article in Arabic. And, as some hypotheses suggest, this may be because “Yemen” means “the south”
But why is it, The United States of America, but then America for short?
Because "America" isn't plural, "States" is
To add to this, when my family lived overseas, we would often use a shorthand.
"We are taking a trip to the States this summer."
"Back in the States, you can find Dr. Pepper but not in Europe or the Middle East."
To long, I guess.
United Kingdom is often shortened to Britain, and in any case it's really the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The UK. But not the Britain.
OP, it has to do with how (in English) the country derived its name. In cases with articles, it’s the result of a geographic feature:
-The United States: the states that are united
-The Congo: the region around the Congo River
-The Philippines: the Philippine Islands
-The Ukraine: adapted from Old Slavic, in which kraj means the edge or border.
-Etc.
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Sometimes plurals need to have an article, such as the Philippines, the Maldives, or the Bahamas, to work in a sentence. Other times, if the name is a noun phrase, it makes more sense with "the", as in "The United Kingdom" - there could be many "united kingdoms", as in kingdoms that are united, but this refers to one United Kingdom specifically. As for "the Gambia" or "the Congo", it's because they are named after the Gambia River and the Congo River.
Ukraine translates roughly to marches or borderlands
So the Ukraine is decently natural as the marches or the borderlands would be.
It made far less sense when Ukraine became an independent country.
Other than "the Congo" and "the Ukraine", which are both disappearing, and the first is already very archaic I think, country names with "the" fall into two categories: 1) plurals, and 2) descriptions with words like Kingdom (and the abbreviations of these). Therefore The Philippines (plural), and "the United Kingdom" (description) or historical terms like "the Dutch republic" or "the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth"
There’s still The Gambia
Also the Lebanon and the Sudan, which have both almost entirely disappeared now.
I feel like in older sources you sometimes see the territory now known as “Jordan” as “the (Trans)jordan” too.
Not countries but nearby: I feel like you still see the Golan and the Sinai.
In the case of the Philippines, it's because it's plural, seeing as English requires a definite article for plural place names or abbreviations like the UK or the US. In other cases, like Ukraine or The Gambia, it's either because of geographical landmarks like rivers or politics. It's also just because a lot of these countries get to choose what they're called. Like, we don't say "the Ukraine" anymore because the Ukrainian government doesn't want it to be called that way, and the same could be said for the Czech Republic, which doesn't want its country being called the Czech Republic anymore but rather Czechia instead, and Turkey changed the spelling of the country's name in English to be what it's called in Turkish, which is Türkiye.
these countries are collective. “the Philippine islands” -> “the Philippines”; “the United States” (a bunch of states); “Ukraine” meant “borderlands”, so some people choose to say “the Ukraine”
I think it’s relative depending on what language you speak honestly. Because in Welsh we have Yr India, Yr Ariannin (the Argentina), Y Iorddonen (the Jordan), Yr Eidal (the Italy) Yr Almaen (the Germany) and Yr Alban (the Alba/Scotland) to name a few that don’t have a definite article in English but they just make sense. Same as how some of them wouldn’t make sense to my Welsh brain when I speak English.
Also I think historically it could be related to the fact they were considered regions or states/principalities etc and might not follow so much as a set logic (to us) nowadays as languages develop.
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It used to be The Ukraine, until late 1991.
Also, The Argentine.
But the question was why it was ever “The Ukraine” (and incidentally it remains “The Ukraine” for a lot of English speakers who were already of a certain age when the USSR disintegrated; the “the” doesn’t imply that it’s a region and not a country, any more than the “the” in “The Gambia” does).
That’s what OP said. However, “the Ukraine” used to be common in English before the breakup of the USSR and for quite a while afterwards. I did still hear it occasionally up until about 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea.
Nowadays though I think my grandma is the only person I ever hear still say it.
Honestly, people getting uppity about this is a serious pet peeve of mine. See the same here in Germany, with the same non-argument: people say the Ukraine is somehow a name that endorses Russian imperialism. Neither Ukrainian nor Russian has articles, and both English and German have historically used an article when referring to Ukraine. I myself haven’t ever had the habit if using the article in English, but do people seriously not see that there is no logical merit to the argument? And that’s not even addressing the fact that it is as nonsensical as it is annoying when non-native speakers go and try to police what exonym you use in your language to refer to their country (see Türkiye, see Czechia, see Bharat).
Sorry if the tone seems aggravated but it’s a fair question: do you also say ‘it’s Bharat’ when India comes up in conversation?
Honestly, I think the commenter is probably just young and didn't know that people used to call it "the Ukraine" in English. You almost never hear it anymore and this wouldn't surprise me if they're under 25 or so.
Don’t worry, Ukrainian and Russian speakers have their own debate on which preposition to use with Ukraine with pretty much the same arguments being used by the sides.
Yes, but OP acknowledges this, and your comment in no way answers their question.
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Not a mishearing, but a borrowing via Portuguese, via Dutch, via Malay, of the Mandarin exonym.
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I suspect my question is actually better suited to r/askgrammarians but since that doesn’t exist I turned here
Is it any funnier than someone asking in a supposedly zoolical subreddit, a question about one specific animal?
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Ukraine used to be called The Ukraine because it was a large area of the Soviet Union that was considered of lesser status. Ukrainian Americans have been irritated about this usage in English for a long time. Maybe not just irritated, angry!!
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The definite article is often used with island groups: the Canaries, the Balearics, the Lesser Antilles. But there are plenty exceptions too, like Micronesia.
It’s because the name is grammatically plural (which in turn is because it’s a collection of islands).
Is “Congo” grammatically plural?
No, but it is named after a river known as “the Congo,” much the way “The Gambia” is named after a river called “the Gambia.”
Mississippi is named after the Mississippi River but you would never say “Jackson is the state capital of The Mississippi”
Nope, sometimes it works that way and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there’s an option: “Yukon” and “the Yukon” are both in use, for instance.
You think it’s a remnant of colonialism that the Netherlands takes the definite article?
Nah I was talking about The Philippines specifically. The one that’s both a former colony and a collection of islands.
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