But what if The The dropped a “the”…would they just be “The”?
Yes, Yugoslavia means south slavia; it seams reasonable that the first syllable of the Ukraine is related, but I don’t actually know this to be true.
The official name of The Hague is 's Gravenhage (probably unpronouncable for you Americans;)), which means ‘the Count’s hedge (or bush)’. This later became just The Hedge (Den Haag) and both are still used (I think 's Gravenhage is used in official matters); given it is ‘den’ and not ‘de’, the abbreviate form goes back quite some years.
Also, in dutch we just cal it Nederland; no plural and no equivalent of ‘the’.
If you’re Dutch, the country is simply “Nederland”. “The Netherlands” is the Anglicisation. However, “The Hague” is closer to the local “Den Hague”. To make up for that, we badly translated “Hoek van Holland” as “Hook of Holland” (hoek means corner).
My favourite Dutch placename is the wonderful 's-Hertogenbosh, translated as “The Duke’s Forest”, which not only begins with the definite article, you have to get through an apostrophe, a lower-case “s” and a hyphen before you get into the meat of the thing. It took a lot of practice before I could pronounce it, even with help from the locals. And even they normally refer to it as Den Bosch.
Where’s a Dutch doper when you need one? There are probably even better names than this, but that’s the best one I know. I should visit more often, it’s a great country.
Yes, the country is named “Nederland” currently, but it’s part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (consisting of the Netherlands, Aruba and the Netherlands’ Antilles).
IIRC historically, the name “the (Kingdom of the) Netherlands” (plural) applies to either the low countries (currently Belgium and Netherland) or the Netherlands (European territories) + its colonies.
And the alternative name for Den Haag / The Hague is “'s-Gravenhage” - “the Count’s hedge / forest”.
I’m just taking a stab at this, but as a speaker of Polish and a smattering of Croatian and other Slavic languages the name “Ukraine” to me looks like the concatenation of the preposition “u” (“at”) and the Slavic word for borderland or frontier: krajina.
Looking at dictionary.com’s entry, it seems to agree, although with a slightly different (and more accurate, I’m sure) derivation:
Anyhow, my guess is any connection you see between “jug-” and the first syllable of “Ukraine” is purely coincidental, especially as Ukraine better splits as “U+kraine” not “Uk+raine.”
If we’re going to talk about all these extraneous things with “The” in the title, I’ll point out something I noticed a while back: The Disney Channel started referring to themselves as just DisneyChannel. I noticed the same thing on Star Trek, with the Klingons just becoming Klingons in TNG, and The Enterprise just becoming Enterprise on the titular show.
I agree with your interpretation, fwiw. “Yug” is south, but “uk” isn’t anything, as far as I know. U, however, is a preposition describing location.
Further extraneous "the"s: In southern German dialects, names are often preceded by “the”, like “Did you see the Markus?”.
It’s not uncommon for small children to refer to themselves like this before they understand the word “I”, because they always hear it that way. One child I know currently calls himself “de Bub” (the boy).
Sure, but it doesn’t really matter whether “uk” means something now or not. The poster, as I understand it, was making the connection that there might have been a jug -> uk corruption/change over time. It’s not a totally unreasonable hypothesis, that the word went jug(o)krajina (“south land/country/region,” although I think most constructions of this type would take the adjectival “south” and thus be something more along the lines of južna krajina or similar)-> ukrajina, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for that.
The Dalles, Oregon.
Along those lines, plenty of cities with Spanish names have definite articles in them (ie, Los Angeles). We just don’t translate them into English.
pulykamell, point taken.
Given that there are thousands of languages spoken today, I find it highly unlikely that most living languages have regulatory bodies. Perhaps you mean some sort of restricted subset of languages for your “matter of fact”.
Wikipedia has kindly provided us with list of languages with regulatory bodies. According to my count, there are 87 languages that have official regulatory bodies; some of them have multiple, competing bodies when the languages are international. Quite a few of them are not widely spoken at all. (Does anyone actually speak Occitan?)
This is, of course, nowhere near most of the languages spoken on earth.
What happened to the Mod** Coldfire **IIRC he was Dutch.
Catalan does this too: you use articles with people’s first names in third person: el Joan, la Sofia. You don’t use the article when addressing the person, though.
Occitan is still commonly used by about 1.5 million people in southern France, all of whom are also fluent in French but use Occitan in home and community uses. It does not appear to be declining.
The relevant central bodies in Paris would term it as no more than dialects of French spoken in small regions, which would be convincing if they had not been using the same descriptors for Alsatian, Flemish, Breton, and Basque.
I’ve noticed this in the speech forms of some people in American English, not terribly common but understood when used and not confined to one dialectal region, where the definite article is used with a name to express contempt. “And I suppose we have to put up with the Marvin today!” Occasionally, particularly in reference to women, the Romance articles will be borrowed: “Everybody realizes that.” “Not according to la Gloria.”
Yep, that’s right. I didn’t realize earlier that there’s some confusion here about that initial “yoo” sound in English. That’s not actually in the original Slavic: Украïна is pronounced “oo-kra-YEEN-a” with no initial jot. There’s no etymological relation whatsoever between that word and the Slavic root for ‘south’. The addition of the “y” in English to make “yoo-KRAIN” is an English innovation.
Oh, no worries. I have a bit of a soapbox I haul out for these occasions, sorry to miss your meaning there. 
Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Die Schweiz, which is what German speakers call Switzerland.