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Re: We are all Slave now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
Seems like there's a tie to British colonialism somehow - the Levant, the Sudan, some others I can't think of right now - but it may just be a relic of historically referencing a region that wasn't a state, or was more than one state.
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It's not a function of British colonialism but it is a question of English usage. In French, for example, countries commonly have the definite article before them: l'Ukraine, la Russie, la Chine. So there's no pejorative implications to referring to l'Ukraine as there is when you refer to the Ukraine in English, which implicitly demotes it from nation-state to component of something larger.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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