I was in San Francisco yesterday, and I noticed that it has “The Golden Gate Bridge” and “Golden Gate Park” (without a the). Why does the bridge get a the and the park doesn’t, even with the same modifier? It seems to apply to other parks and bridges - e.g. The Brooklyn Bridge vs. Central Park.
There appear to be other geographic features that either do or don’t take a “the”. Rivers have “the” but lakes don’t.
Any ideas why? My searches have either confirmed this without giving a reason, or discussed why some countries (e.g. The Ukraine) are preceded with “the” - which is interesting in its own right, but doesn’t seem to be connected to my question.
‘Ukraine’ means borderland or marshes so if you’re talking about it ‘the’ is necessary because English. The Philippines is bizarre though, maybe because it’s plural?
Arbitrary reasons in general I think though.
Spanish has this as well for what it’s worth. In Spanish the city is always called ‘la habana’, or ‘the Havana’ and I have never understood why.
Wait…you’re telling me that English, a language that accepts “the hoi polloi” demands “the Ukraine” because it’s so damned rigorous about definite articles?
(“Hoi” is the Greek definite article that goes with the plural “polloi,” or “people.” “The hoi polloi” means “the the people,” though you hear the phrase this way all the time in English. It’s so common that correcting it would only confirm one’s status as a pedant).
“The Golden Gate Bridge” is not really a place-name, but the name of a structure or building, and they generally get the definite article - the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, the White House. (But cf. Buckingham Palace).
As for place-names, island groups tend to get the definite article - the Bahamas, the Philippines, the Falkland Islands. For other place-names, it seems to be a bit hit-and-miss - Chile, Asia Minor, Indochina but the Argentine, the Levant, the Subcontinent. But I think there’s a trend away from the use of the definite article - it tends to sound old-fashioned, and I think the people of the places concerned generally prefer that it not be used - Argentina, not the Argentine; Ukraine, not the Ukraine, Sudan, not the Sudan.
Note: You didn’t specifically ask about this, but it will come up inevitably. It always does when we have this discussion.
There are a small number of cities and towns that have ‘The’ as part of their name. Most of the older names (The Hague, The Dalles, The Pas) were due to partial translation. The newer names (The Village OK, The Woodlands TX, The Colony TX, The Villages FL) can be attributed to pretension. The Bronx doesn’t fall into either category. It falls into the category of areas named after rivers (e.g. The Congo, The Palouse) since it was named after the Bronx River, which in turn was named after Jonas Bronck, an early settler.
The crux of the answer is essentially “habit.” Similar examples of usage dictated by mere habit are the Chesapeake Bay, the Palouse, the Sears Tower, and the Ohio State University. Another example: the recent (since 1980) Southern California usage of the 605 or the 10 for freeways, following the example set more logically when the area’s superhighways were called the San Diego Freeway, etc. San Franciscans refer to their city’s districts as the Richmond, the Sunset, the Mission or—even with one only invented circa 1980—the Castro. In other cities, it would be more common to say “he lives out in Richmond, not in the Richmond.
As for The Bronx, one of the region’s earliest prominent settlers was Jonas Bronck, who came to the area in the early 1600s. The 500 acres he owned on the mainland came to be called Bronck’s land, and the river nearby became The Bronck’s River. There is a theory that locals referred to the area as the Broncks’— as in, “We’re going to a party at the Broncks’”—and that this stuck. Other explanations claim that it stems from always using the definite article for rivers, as in The Nile. But, of course, we don’t refer to American states The Colorado and The Mississippi.This Slate piece has a good summary of the capriciousness of definite articles in placenames.
Most of the placename literature, such as George Stewart’s Names on the Land, merely mentions the Bronck family as if that were sufficient explanation, but of course many city neighborhoods across the country take the name of their original landowners without any definite article being added. In “From the Hague to the Bronx: Definite Articles in Place Names,” which appeared in the Fall 1987 issue of the Journal of the North Central Name Society, Steven Hess concludes the name is abbreviated from “Borough of the Bronx River,” an older term designating the surrounding area.
La Habana originally referred to the area: the town was the Village of St. Christopher in the Habana, less than three decades later it got upgraded to a City. Now it is literally called “the City in the Habana”, but it has also completely overtaken that area which used to surround it.
I’ve had Ukrainians tell me that adding [the] is wrong and I’m more inclined to listen to them. And they do have a point, after all nobody says “The England”.
yep, it’s definitely arbitrary and down to habit. I’m in the Detroit area and can always tell when Sirius has some “out-of-towner” do the traffic reports because they’ll use that convention, talking about traffic conditions on “the 94.” We don’t say that here, it’s either “94” or “I-94.” Despite the fact that- similar to your example- it used to be “The Edsel Ford Freeway.”
I agree that’s the relatively non-puzzling difference between a structure and a place, though of course that’s not 100% consistent either.
Seems to me the important aspect where a country cares about the ‘the’ is where it implies a region rather than a country, as in Levant and Subcontinent definitely, also indirectly the Argentine, which mimics the Spanish ‘La Argentina’, also originally referring to a region though also later the country. Countries which neighboring countries’ leaders call ‘not really a country’ (Putin’s reported 2008 remark to GW Bush about Ukraine) are not surprisingly particularly sensitive to that implication. It’s not a matter of correcting to a perfectly consistent English standard obviously, and it’s not specifically because ‘Ukraine’ in the old local language might be equated to the archaic word English word ‘march’ for ‘borderland’. So can the name Denmark and that doesn’t get a ‘the’. It seems in case of countries named for island chains (the x islands shortened to the x’s) this isn’t as sensitive a point in the actual cases, though in some cases that the ‘the’ was dropped (Japan was referred to as ‘The Japans’ at one time in English).
My understanding, perhaps from a previous thread, is that the Soviets encouraged use of “the Ukraine” to emphasize that it was just a geographic region of the USSR. Per Wikipedia, the present independent country prefers people not to use the “the”.
There are only two countries in the world who officially use “the” as part of their names, those being The Bahamas and The Gambia (at least according to Wiki). As a matter of habit, some other countries are addressed using the definite article (Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States, etc., which have an implied plural). Then there are countries where “the” is included somewhere in the name, such as Republic of the Congo, often shortened to The Congo. And some are just habits of language, like Sudan or Czech Republic.
