Place names (plus a ship).

Factual Questions
1

Why is it that in the past few years we hear, in official Journalese, of “Congo” and “Ukraine” when it used to be
“The Congo” and “The Ukraine”? Granted, maybe the people
who live there think that “The” makes the names of their countries sound like vague historical regions, and hence has
a colonialist air to it. But if that’s true, then why is it still The Hague and The Bronx?

And on a related note, in the movie Titanic, why did the “Old Rose” character always drop the article when saying Titanic…i.e. “Titanic sank from under us”, as if it
were a proper name.

These are all just quibbles of mine, but they jar my innate
syntactic sense.

2

I’ll reply to your second question first, and your second one, er, uh… never. I don’t know.

Anyway, I’ve been gainfully employed on 3 ships now (or Cutters, as we say) and we never refer to them with the article, only the name. One of the names of those cutters was my nick- Chandeleur. The sea stories always start off: This is a no-shitter. Back when I was on Chandeleur, blah blah blah lie lie story story… waves were 45 feet!!! sharks were everywhere blah blah…

©

3

javaman, the current correct name for The Ukraine is Ukraine, because the government of Ukraine has requested it. Nice flag, too. Too bad none of my relatives out-lived Stalin…

And a ship’s name is a Proper Name. Did you see “The” written on the transom of the ship in the movie? No? Ten it was perfectly proper to call her by her name.

4

You’re certainly right about “The Bronx” being the proper designation of that borough; and yes, the official 1897 legislation creating the place even capitalizes the “T”… though you won’t see written that way very often.

But you can add that “The” (and “the”) to your endangered list, too. Sloppy/lazy/ignorant mapmakers and such have been dropping it in recent years, and many Bronxites aren’t happy about it.

5

And therefore, the correct terms are

“a The Bronx cheer”
“the The Bronx bombers”
“the The Bronx High School of Science (or the The Bronx Science”
“the The Bronx Zoo”

etc.

6

No, the correct name is “The Bronx High School of Kids Who Couldn’t Get Into Stuyvesant.”

Sorry, inside joke.

7

I believe that “The Hague” has an article in it in Dutch. When I traveled there, the train’s destination was listed as Den Haag.
Please correct my Dutch spelling if I have erred.

8

What the hell is Stuyvesant? Isn’t that a ghetto in NYC?

9

Why is the Bronx called THE Bronx?

10

As far as I know the ‘U’ in Ukraine is a definite article so “The Ukraine” would mean something like “The the borderland” in English (please correct me if I’m wrong).

Floater

11

Sorry, Floater, no dice. U in Russian and Ukrainian is a preposition, meaning ‘by’ or ‘on’. Krai is the Russian word for ‘edge’ or ‘border’ (can’t vouch for Ukrainian on this one) so a possible interpretation of Ukraina is ‘on the border’. Probably because the Russians thought it was the edge of the world/civilization/what have you.

As was noted on another thread of this sort many moons ago (unfortunately too lazy to look up the link), Russian and Ukrainian do not have a definite or indefinite article, so it was never called ‘the Ukraine’ over there. God knows where we got the idea of putting that definite article in there. Maybe it was a Bronxian who felt the same way about the annexation of Ukraine as he did about the incorporation of The Bronx into NYC. :wink:

12

I was going to say it’s the difference between a country and a state – I’m going to THE United States of America to visit my cousin in New York," but we don’t use “the” with Europe, so that’s not it. I’m going to England and see the rest of the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, the United Arab Emirates. Sorry, no answer for ya – doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this one.

13

There is a reason for most, if not all, of them and it can be summarized in two words: English syntax.

If the name sounds like a noun phrase (adjective + noun), we generally put a “the” in front of it. It doesn’t matter that they are capitalized words or proper nouns; English syntax doesn’t always pay attention to those niceties. This applies to lakes as well: Lake Superior vs. the Great Salt Lake (with Lake Superior, it’s noun + adjective, so the syntax is circumvented). Rivers, though, seem to be an exception in that they always seem to get an article even when reversed: the River Thames.

However, in most of these cases, we don’t consider the word “the” to be part of the name. In the rare cases of The Bronx and a few others (The Dalles, OR, for example) it is. There are historical reasons for these cases and Cecil has already discussed The Bronx. The Dalles is a partial translation from French name le Dalles, “the flagstones”.

Now can anyone give the historical reason for The Gambia? I suspect that it’s a conflation with the name of the river, just as (I think) The Congo is. But the use of “the” as parts of these countries’ names seems to be on the way out. When’s the last the last time you heard anyone refer to Argentina as The Argentine?

14

Well, all countries which are plural or are of the form adjective-noun have an article. The United States (plural), the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, the Soviet Union, the Ivory Coast (adjective/noun).

For a while I kept a list of areas which began with The for a different reason. I came up with:

The Congo
The Gambia
The Sudan
The Yemen (archaic)
The Hague
The Bronx
The Ukraine
The Levant (the Middle East countries which border the Mediterranean Sea)
The Beauce (a region of Quebec)
The Pas, Manitoba

…any others?

15

Does La Paz count? If it does you’re gonna open a big can of worms.

16

Let’s stick strictly to English and ignore French, Spanish and Portuguese examples. Otherwise the list could get very long indeed.

I’ve already mentioned a couple additions to matt_mcl’s list: The Dalles, OR and The Argentine (archaic). There’s also The Wash, a shallow bay in England due north of London. And a couple towns in Texas called The Colony and The Woodlands.

There’s a suburb of Oklahoma City that used to be called The Village but now seems to be just called Village.

17

I just reread (it had been a few years) Alphagene’s link to Cecil’s column on “The Bronx.” Historical accident or not, the term “The Bronx” is formally codified in the legislation that named the borough. Some background…

As Cecil points out, when NYC first expanded beyond Manhattan Island (1874) it annexed a chunk of lower Westchester County, west of the Bronx River. This was called variously “the 23rd and 24th Wards,” “the North Side” and “the Annexed District.” (I have never heard Cecil’s phrase “the Annexed District of the Bronx,” but no matter.)

In 1895, the 24th Ward of NYC was expanded to include more of lower Westchester Co., this time the portion east of the Bronx River.

In 1897 the NY State legislature passed the Greater New York Charter which consolidated Kings County (coextensive with the City of Brooklyn), Richmond County (Staten Island), and the western third of Queens County into the City of New York – then consisting of Manhattan Island and all of the Annexed District. That’s when the borough names were officially born.

I quote from the charter:

“Division into Boroughs.
SEC.2 The City of New York, as constituted by this Act, is hereby divided into five Boroughs to be designated respectively: Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond; the boundaries whereof shall be as follows: …”

Everywhere “Bronx” is mentioned it is preceded by “The,” even in phrases like “…the Borough of The Bronx…”; the first “the” is lower case, and the second “The” is capped.

Thus, it is “The Bronx,” complete with an upper case “T.”

Argyle: (I said it was an inside joke, but you asked, so…) The not-so-great neighborhood in NYC you’re thinking of is Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Stuyvesant is a high school in Manhattan that is the perennial rival of Bronx Science; both are specialized math-science public (yes, free) schools that admit students strictly on the basis of entrance exam scores. SHS – which has a higher score requirement than BS – is often described as the best high school in the country, a statement based on test scores, SAT’s, Westinghouse/Intel Award winners, Ivy League admissions, etc…

Stuyvesant’s reputation has lately spread beyond NYC and the academic world via Pulitzer Prize author Frank McCourt (“Angela’s Ashes,” “'Tis”) who taught there and refers to the school and its students in his books. It’s alumni include countless movers and shakers in various fields, but mostly scientists and doctors, including one astronaut and at least one Nobel Prize winner. And, oh yeah, James Cagney graduated from there too.

18

Berkeley has a couple of streets which go by “The xxxxxx”.

I used to live on “The Alameda”. It was listed in map books in the “T” section. There was also a street called “The Shortcut”, although I never suceeded in finding it as it was way up in the Berkeley Hills and wasn’t very long.

19

To streets let me add The Esplanade, in Toronto.

Hmmm…

I notice that a lot of The’s have eponymous rivers: Congo, Gambia, Bronx, Beauce, Argentine (Río de la Plata). And of course rivers always take The.

20

I have a feeling you can probably find lots of streets if you scour the maps of all the major cities.

One non-street is The Palouse. This is a region of rolling hills in southeastern Washington state. There is a Palouse River that flows through it and possibly gave it the name. This name is related to the Appaloosa horse, although the exact relationship is uncertain.