Re: We are all Slave now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
Until I read this I never realized that most countries are seldom call "the NAME." Russia is just Russia, Canada- Canada etc. The US of A and The USSR are exceptions. But Ukraine has always been the Ukraine ("the Ukraine is weak Newman!"), until i read this, where "
Ukraine" gav eme pause because it sounded wrong. Is there some rule or is this another random English quirk?
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Things are called "the NAME" when they are not a country, but a part of another country/empire. The Ukraine, the Sudetenland, the Midlands, the Pale, the Netherlands (in the Hapsburg Empire). When they become a country, they sometimes shed the "the" in order to assert their own nationhood, as Ukraine did.
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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
Last edited by Tyrone Slothrop; 03-29-2018 at 01:37 PM..
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