They dropped the “Der”? That’s just plain wrong.
Actually, I seem to remember that now. We had some in my West Texas berg. They went to gourmet hot dogs or some such, IIRC. Growing up we used to call the place “Der Dog.”
And it should be “das.”
Should have been “Das Hund.” 
My friend reports that in the Russian language, the preposition “NA” is used for regions and “V” is used for sovereign nations, corresponding to the use of “the” or its absence in English
I wonder if the difference between British and US usage is that “in the hospital” in the US invariably means checked into the physical hospital, i.e. a place. The British usage may be “in hospital” to indicate undergoing a function or process of “hospital”. This seems to me to be backed up by the use of “at the hospital” to indicate being at a place being favored by both UK and US.
I wonder if the British, after telling someone that their father was “in hospital”, if asked “Which one?” and not knowing the name, would reply “Hospital at the intersection of High Street and Broad Street” or would start the sentence with the article in question (the).
A million years ago, I used to go there to play croquet against the retirees at the old folks home.
It’s called The Gambia after the Gambia River, and that’s the official name of the country, but it’s referred to colloquially as simply Gambia (at least that’s how the Gambian expats I work with refer to it.)
I’ve speculated that this pattern started when Americans mostly lived in smaller towns – there was only 1 hospital or 1 university in the area, so it was referred to with the definite article. Whereas in Britain, being a much smaller & more crowded country, didn’t have the single one locally, so no definite article.
Will nobody think of The Tyrol?
As others have pointed out, we Americans will say that someone is “in school,” and I think the difference is that in the US, we think of “hospital” as a physical building and “university” as a physical campus, but “in school” can refer to the state of a person, without thinking about the building. In UK English, they think of “hospital” and “university” as the state that a person is in (when the words are used like that), and not so much a physical place.
That’s interesting; I had always assumed that the article in “The Gambia” came from the fact that the country was named after the river, and rivers typically go with articles. The river played an important role in the political history of the country: Surrounding Senegal was a French colony, but during the Seven Years’ War the Royal Navy made incursions along the river and took as much land as they could secure with ships. That’s why The Gambia is essentially a narrow strip of land inside Sebegal along the Gambia river.
As for The Hague in the Netherlands: The official name of the city in Dutch is 's‑Gravenhage, which has the additional coolness of being a place name that starts (!) with an apostrophe. That word means the count’s hedge, because the area was originally a hunting ground of the counts of Holland. That term was colloquially shortened to “the hedge”, and that shortened version gradually became official; the long version is hardly ever used except in very formal documents, although it does remain the formal name of the city. From that root, the definite article was carried over into many other languages.
Both interesting and plausible theories! I found this question and answer page which seems to bear out CurtC’s theory that, in British English at least, ‘in hospital’ is the state of being hospitalized, whereas ‘in the hospital’ is more the physical act of visiting the hospital. So then it eventually got dumbed down simplified in American English, maybe due to Tim_T-Bonham.net’s theory.
Yes, as your link says, the same distinction occurs in US English with the phrases “in school/in college/at church” vs in “the school/in the college/at the church” so it’s a construction USians are familiar with; we just don’t use it for “hospital” for whatever reason. I’m not sure Tim’s theory is convincing – after all, lots of small localities only had one school and we don’t say “she’s in the school” when referring to being in classes (as opposed to merely the physical building.)
This is slightly off-topic, but nonetheless: I work with a lot of people from all over Europe, with English as our working language, and I can often tell instantly if a document was written by a colleague with a Slavic native language: The use of definite articles is wrong. The Slavic languages don’t have articles, so people who grew up in that environment don’t develop a feeling for how to use them. They’ll either omit an article where there should be one, or conversely, they over-compensate and include articles where there shouldn’t be any. This is not meant in a disparaging way towards those colleagues - I’m sure I have my own idiosyncracies from my own native language. I simply find this one amusing because I noticed it many times. It’s quite a good shibboleth.
Thus, the typical American parody of a Russian spy speaking English is to leave off articles.
Also a good way of identifying Russian internet trolls.
In Russia, articles leave off you!
This was codified in the 1880s when they were drawing official borders for African colonies. The down-river parts of the Senegal-Gambian border are straight lines, but for the up river parts, they decided that the border would be a specific distance from the navigable part of the river. The distance they chose was the maximum range of a certain Royal Navy ship (which I assume was the most of any ship in the fleet at that time) and turned out to be ten miles. So the eastern part of Gambia became a twenty-mile wide worm following the course of the river.
This is one of three border sections I know of that are based on a displacement from some other feature. The other two are state borders in the US.
Especially if you play football and attended one particular university in Ohio…
THE Ohio State University