"Ukraine" or "The Ukraine"?

The Congo is a trickier one, of course. There is a river of that name, but there are two countries named after it.
 
Rat said:
It already does serve as a noun. It is a language.
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And the name of the people who come from there. So if you give shelter to a native of the place who's been deported, you're caching a bounced Czech.
 
Yes, I remember well when Pat Cash was playing Ivan Lendl in the Wimbledon final. Much punning was performed.
 
Rat said:
The Congo is a trickier one, of course. There is a river of that name, but there are two countries named after it.
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I know of the totally misnamed democratic republic (it's neither of those things), but what's the other one?
 
Cleon said:
That doesn't make much sense. As I said upthread, the Russian language has no definite article - there's no equivalent of "the." So how would a tsar employ such a "linguistic ploy?" :confused:
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Although there's no definite article, you can still make that "linguistic ploy" in most languages. Norwegian doesn't have a definite article either, but there's still a linguistic difference between a girl (jente) and the girl (jenta).
 
I wonder if they will ever just add a "land" after "Czech". I mean, we already have Deutschland, Russland, Lapland, Switzerland, and a few others. "Czechland" (or its equivalent in the Czech language) would not be much of a stretch compared to the names of some of its neighbors.

Czechistan sounds good, too.
 
Ryokan said:
Although there's no definite article, you can still make that "linguistic ploy" in most languages. Norwegian doesn't have a definite article either, but there's still a linguistic difference between a girl (jente) and the girl (jenta).
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Russian doesn't have that. "Girl" and "the girl" would both be "девочка" (devochka).
 
Morrigan said:
Touché. I'm sure there a few more, and that they're all pluralized too.
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The Belgian Congo is not pluralized.

This evening I spoke with a woman who lived in Argentina for many years, and whose husband is from Argentina, and I asked her about "Argentina" vs. "The Argentine". She speaks Spanish fluently, and said that in Argentina, the proper name for the country is "La Argentina" (The Argentine), and that is how "The Argentine" came to be used in English-speaking countries.
 
I don't like saying "the Congo", though. I prefer just saying "Congo" or "the Republic of Congo". "The Congo" sounds jarring to my ears.
 
DallasDad said:
Etymologically, traceable back to about the 12th Century, Krajina (whence Ukraine or Ukrayina) meant "borderlands" or "frontier." In the time of the USSR, and even before, Ukraine was considered a frontier, and hence called "the Ukraine," much the same way the Dutch word nederland gave us "the Netherlands."
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Nederland is just the short form of (Koninkrijk der) Nederlanden, which is plural.
It's plural because historically there are whole bunch of 'em.
 
crescent said:
I wonder if they will ever just add a "land" after "Czech". I mean, we already have Deutschland, Russland, Lapland, Switzerland, and a few others. "Czechland" (or its equivalent in the Czech language) would not be much of a stretch compared to the names of some of its neighbors.

Czechistan sounds good, too.
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A bit of a frivolous derail -- however, extreme-trivia item coming up. I learnt recently, that various Central Asian / Middle Eastern peoples refer in their own languages to Poland, as "Lekhistan" (after Lech, the legendary founder of the Polish nation). Maybe, on that model, these folk do indeed speak of Czechistan?
 
fleabeetle said:
A bit of a frivolous derail -- however, extreme-trivia item coming up. I learnt recently, that various Central Asian / Middle Eastern peoples refer in their own languages to Poland, as "Lekhistan" (after Lech, the legendary founder of the Polish nation). Maybe, on that model, these folk do indeed speak of Czechistan?
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This I found interesting, but I can't find any examples of it. I tried Arabic, Hebrew, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Pashtun, and a few others, and they all have whatever rendering of 'Poland' they can manage. Do they just refer to it as such colloquially?
 
Rat said:
This I found interesting, but I can't find any examples of it. I tried Arabic, Hebrew, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Pashtun, and a few others, and they all have whatever rendering of 'Poland' they can manage. Do they just refer to it as such colloquially?
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I just call it EeneyMinnieMotania (although mail addressed there always gets returned as undeliverable). :mad:
 
fleabeetle said:
A bit of a frivolous derail -- however, extreme-trivia item coming up. I learnt recently, that various Central Asian / Middle Eastern peoples refer in their own languages to Poland, as "Lekhistan" (after Lech, the legendary founder of the Polish nation). Maybe, on that model, these folk do indeed speak of Czechistan?
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Rat said:
This I found interesting, but I can't find any examples of it. I tried Arabic, Hebrew, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Pashtun, and a few others, and they all have whatever rendering of 'Poland' they can manage. Do they just refer to it as such colloquially?
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I'll admit, from a possibly-suspect source (and re which I could have made myself clearer -- sorry) -- but stuff which I found diverting, so wanted to be true. Comes from a memoir, The Ice Road, publ.1999, by Stefan Waydenfeld. The author, a Pole, was -- per his account -- caught in / subsumed into the USSR by the events of autumn 1939, and he and his family deported, as potentially dodgy types in the Soviet view of things, deep into the USSR, and basically confined in its Gulag; let go after the German invasion of the USSR, when Polish armies-in-exile were being formed. They underwent lengthy and exhausting travels through wide reaches of the Soviet Union, in order to get to where the Polish army could be joined up with.

Per the book, at one point the travelers are in Kazakhstan, and need help from some local Kazakh guys, who are bitter and resentful about being under the Russian / Soviet yoke, and ready to be hostile to clearly European-looking strangers who they see likely to be Russian. The Poles need to persuade them that they are not Russian -- one of them has the brainwave of coming out with the words "Lekhistan / Lekhistani" -- after which the Kazakhs are all smiles and helpfulness. Quoting from the book: "Lekhistan is the old Turkish and Tatar name for Poland. It goes back to the medieval invasions of Europe by Tatars, the ancestors of Kazakhs."

Mr. Wajdenfeld's book is an enthralling read; but in honesty, I'm not totally certain that it is not (whether deliberately, or owing to confused remembering by an author in his dotage) fanciful / inaccurate. The mind goes to a book by a Pole supposedly in a rather similar predicament at the same time -- Slawomir Rawicz's The Long Walk -- which is pretty much universally reckoned to be fraudulent. Apologies for coming out with something which I liked, and which seemed beautifully to fit in -- but which could possibly be, essentially, a load of bull.
 
fleabeetle said:
Per the book, at one point the travelers are in Kazakhstan, and need help from some local Kazakh guys, who are bitter and resentful about being under the Russian / Soviet yoke, and ready to be hostile to clearly European-looking strangers who they see likely to be Russian. The Poles need to persuade them that they are not Russian -- one of them has the brainwave of coming out with the words "Lekhistan / Lekhistani" -- after which the Kazakhs are all smiles and helpfulness. Quoting from the book: "Lekhistan is the old Turkish and Tatar name for Poland. It goes back to the medieval invasions of Europe by Tatars, the ancestors of Kazakhs."
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This particular story might be made up, but I met two people who had almost exactly same experience. One was a Russian Jew who, along with his family, got lost in Riga (during Soviet times). Every person they tried to ask for directions would shake his head "no understand". Until the grandmother addressed someone in Yiddish, and this person responded -- in perfect Russian, -- "Sorry, I do not speak Jewish, but perhaps you understand Russian?" They all understood Russian, but refused to speak it until they knew the person is not actually the hated oppressor.

The other story came from an American man who traveled with his wife to Ireland. Again, nobody would understand their English until he said in frustration: "Nobody here speaks American!" At which point the shop owner said "You are Americans? Here, have some US flag pins -- you will have much easier time around here!"
 
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