I’ve never understood why Ireland gets a sea but England only gets a channel. Seems a bit unfair.
If you’re going to argue that “Ireland” is an inappropriate descriptor for the state of that name on the grounds that it doesn’t embrace the whole island, then you can hardly with consistency suggest that the whole island was ever “British”; it has always been distinct from Great Britain.
This isn’t that difficult. The name of the state, in English, is “Ireland”. The description of the state, which can be used if you need to disambiguate, is “the Republic of Ireland”.
It’s a mistake to try to use non-English words to disambiguate; either your audience won’t understand them or, worse, you won’t. The Irish word “eire” means a load or burden. “Éire” (the accent matters) is the Irish name of the whole island and also the name of the state in Irish; it has the same range of meanings as “Ireland”.
Actually, this bit isn’t simple to me. The whole “description of the state” business is gibberish to me. It’s capitalized; this, it’s the proper name of something, not a description. And anyway what does it mean to designate an official description? That’s meaningless. Every other country has an official or formal name in the form of “Republic of” or “Kingdom of” or whatever. That’s not a description. That’s a name.
Nm
The French don’t even want the English to have that.
Indeed. For them, it’s just a piece of clothing (and while they’re at it, their name for the Channel Islands is, at best, a grudging sharing with us)
According to the Wikipedia article I linked on the name of the state, some countries don’t, for example Hungary and Ukraine.
Why would you need such a term? There is no concept of people from France and Belgium but not Italy, or Germans and Austrian but no Poles.
Agreed.
And Canada and Japan.
You don’t but it would be helpful to have a commonly understood and politically neutral term for the island group itself.
I guess it might, but those of us who inhabit these sceptred isles (Sceptered Isles?), whichever part we come from (Well, apart from some Scot Nats) will happily support GB at the Olympics and our home team in The Six Nations.
Diùra is the Gaelic name of the Isle of Jura, thus the demonym.
Vectis was the Roman name for the Isle of Wight
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that you are unaware that Ireland sends its own team to the Olympics.
Yes, I phrased it badly. Except a small number of nation-states that have just a single geographic designation as its name, most nation-states have a short name and a long/formal/official name that includes some type of indication of the form of statehood, such as “Republic of” or “Kingdom of,” but in those cases, those are two names.
I fundamentally don’t understand what Ireland means by calling “Republic of Ireland” a description. When I read or hear that, I get the feeling that I’m suddenly unable to understand the English language, because I have no idea what that’s talking about. I can’t conceive of how “Republic of Ireland” isn’t a name.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the main character, Winston Smith, lived in London, which was part of a geographical entity called Airstrip One, which was a subdivision of the nation of Oceania, whose global rivals were Eurasia and Eastasia.
My guess is that it means that official government documents, passports, treaties etc, just use “Ireland” and never use the phrase “Republic of Ireland”.
As for the terminology, “name” versus “description”, my guess is that there is official acknowledgement of the fact that people will use “Republic of Ireland” to avoid ambiguity, but a desire to assert that, for various historic reasons, it’s not what the state should be officially referred to. They need two different terms and have settled on “name” and “description”, they could probably have chosen another two like “title” and “clarifier” without changing much else.
How about the Pasty People. For the pastry/sandwich-like dish. Not for skin color, of course. Or Pastians, the Pastese, …