My wife and I have been watching The Brokenwood Mysteries, a sort of Midsomer Murders set in New Zealand, which is fun and undemanding, as we prefer with pre-bedtime viewing. The episode we saw last night featured a venomous spider called the katipō, and of course I was curious about the word. Wiktionary has it for English and Afrikaans as “Borrowed from Maori katipo,” but it doesn’t have the Maori word, so that’s no help (and the OED entry, from 1901, simply says “A borrowing from Māori”). The Wikipedia article says:
The common name katipō (singular and plural), often spelled “katipo”, is from the Māori for “night stinger”, derived from the words kakati (to sting) and pō (the night). This name was apparently given to the species owing to the Māori belief that the spiders bite at night.
But I have questions. That etymology is sourced to Anonymous (1872), “The katipo or poisonous spider of New Zealand” (Nature 7 [159]: 29), and frankly I don’t trust it — it smells like folk etymology. Is it likely that kakati would be reduced to kati- in a compound? (I’m not saying it’s not; I simply don’t know.) Leaving aside the plausibility of the etymology and looking up the component parts, the ACD has *gatgat ‘to bite something off, to chew something up; to mince,’ giving Proto-Oceanic *kakat-i ‘to chew or bite off’ (Maori kakati ‘to sting, bite, eat, gnaw’); for the second element, Wiktionary says:
From Proto-Polynesian *poo, from Proto-Central Pacific *boŋi, from Proto-Oceanic *boŋi (compare with Samoan pogi, Hawaiian poni), from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *bəʀŋi (compare with Javanese wengi), from Proto-Austronesian *bəʀŋi.
Which is well and good, but the ACD entry for *boŋi ‘night’ doesn’t show any pō forms (nor is there such an independent entry that I can find). What gives?
Plausibly the same element as for the nocturnal parrot called a kākāpō, although that doesn’t give any more information about where it comes from.
(Also, I don’t really understand the dictionary, but ‘po’ forms appear to be in the note underneath the entry)
You’re absolutely right — I didn’t scroll down far enough!
Why not include them in the main entry? I don’t really understand the dictionary either!
For Polynesian etymologies, POLLEX is your friend.
The Māori dictionary has it, as well as namu katipō ‘mosquito’, lit. ‘night-biting sandfly’.
Ah, so POLLEX takes it from a PPN *kati ‘bite’ — no haplology needed. Thanks! (And I’ve added POLLEX to the sidebar.)
Yeah, kakati/katikati etc. are reduplicated.
Pō is the everyday word for night (New Zealander here, not Māori and a rudimentary level speaker of te reo rangatira, but even a monlingual English seaker who grew up here would know “pō” by osmosis, I think).
Kākāpō is indeed the night parrot, literally (compare kākā, another member of the Nestor genus, and kākāriki, a small parakeet).
And yes reduplication is very common, typical in Polynesian languages but I think in Austronesian generally?
Te reo = “the language”, often expanded to te reo Māori, the Māori language, but these days often te reo rangatira, the language of chiefs, as people try to reclaim the prestige of the language. Referring to it as “te reo” is very common in New Zealand English. As an aside, “te” is a definite article, and again nearly everyone knows that even if they have no Māori language at all, but often in English you’ll hear people say things like “What’s the te reo translation?”
As an aside, “te” is a definite article, and again nearly everyone knows that even if they have no Māori language at all, but often in English you’ll hear people say things like “What’s the te reo translation?”
But that’s perfectly good and normal, because “te” is a definite article in Māori, not English; in English “te reo” is an unanalyzable phrase that is used as a block. Compare the identical situation with “hoi polloi”: pedants say “You can’t say ‘the hoi polloi’ because ‘hoi’ is an article meaning ‘the,’” but that’s nonsense — it’s an article in Greek, not English.
For sure. It’s only odd because as I say, most English speakers here do have that latent knowledge. We can use “te” jokingly before an English noun instead of “the” to imply association with Māori. Hoi polloi isn’t a great analogy because so few of us have enough Greek to parse it. In my mind it’s more like, I dunno, saying “the la dolce vita” or “I was reading the Das Kapital”.
It occurs to me that if Marx had been writing in English, he’d just have called it “Capital.”
We were just talking about how German is more into generic definite articles than English the other day:
https://languagehat.com/milanese-caca/#comment-4632991
It works better in English with a modifier of some kind, though. In fact, the article seems positively to be required in some such cases: “Naked Ape” really only works as a novel title, not as pop-sci.
Hoi polloi isn’t a great analogy because so few of us have enough Greek to parse it. In my mind it’s more like, I dunno, saying “the la dolce vita” or “I was reading the Das Kapital”.
Good point!
I’m not so sure it’s a good analogy, because “the” wouldn’t normally be used with a book title, unless maybe you were referring to a specific physical book, like “I was reading the Das Kapital with the red cover, not the black one,” in which case I’d say it might be grammatical, even if “I was reading the The Lord of the Rings with the red cover” is less so.
… POLLEX … Māori Dictionary [thanks @ Y] … [thanks @Stephen J]
All cleared up while New Zealand was sleeping (or at least I was).
I’ve seen a katipō only at our local wildlife park. They’re very shy and will hide themselves long before big creatures get near. They bite only when cornered and can’t get away. And the bite is painful but not usually severe, except maybe for kids or small pets. “no deaths have been reported since 1923” says wikip. So very different to Australia, where you face instant death every time you go outdoors.
How did the katipō feature in the Midsomer Murders-alike?
A corpse was found with a katipō in her mouth. It turned out to be a (black-and-)red herring, of course, but all the facts you mention are explained by a fervent arachnologist. (The episode is Series 3 #1, “The Black Widower,” if anyone’s curious.)
he’d just have called it “Capital.”
Except readers such as Mr Pickwick might have thought he meant it as in I say, old fellow, that’s capital!
Ah, that would be Series 3 Episode 1 [spoiler alert — and I’ve crossed in the post with our host].
You’d need to milk a lot of katipō to have any effect on the typical wife of a tour guide.
And the arachnologist did, in fact, milk a lot of katipō! (But — spoiler — she wasn’t the murderer; that would have been too obvious.)
It occurs to me that if Marx had been writing in English, he’d just have called it “Capital.”
And that’s what this translation, at least, is titled. I recall hearing people call it Capital when I was in college, 40-some years ago, too.
I don’t recall hearing anyone object to “the Las Vegas airport”, “the Le Mans circuit”, etc.
the El Alamein
the La Brea tar pits (although the site actually calls itself “Rancho La Brea”)
I think these examples are slightly cheating, as the foreign arthrous expression is in each case used en bloc as a premodifier; even the “the El Alamein” is presumably elliptical for “the El Alamein Drive-Thru and Takeaway” or some such. None is a case of an English and a foreign article both attached to the same noun, as in the case of “the hoi polloi.”
The same is actually true of “what’s the te reo translation”, come to think of it.
It is even (just barely) grammatical (for me, anyhow) to say “I don’t really get the The Onion’s sense of humour.”
But the original example was “What’s the te reo translation?” Now if people say “What’s the te reo for that?” we could discuss whether there’s an elided “translation” in the question.
A more clearcut example would be “how does it go in the original te reo?”
This actually seems to have an interesting interaction with phenomenon of “the” being licensed by a modifier. It’s grammatical to say “How do you say it in the French?”, but you would be much more likely to say “in French.” But you would certainly say “What is it in the original French?” (“What is it in original French?” is something for a historical linguist to say …)
If this hypothesis proves unable to account for the data, I can always produce as a handy epicycle the fix that “the te reo” is here elliptical for “the te reo language.” Ellipsis! Is there anything it can’t do?
New Zealand’s venomous creatures [2009] — necrotising arachnidism alert!
I believe the reported incidence of spider bites is much higher than their shy retiring nature would indicate. (It’s the Aussie imports that are the worse, of course.) If somebody comes into ED with a rash/swelling of indeterminate origin, it’ll be put down as a spider bite. IIRC from @DE British medics have some obscure Latin phrases for the same purpose: we don’t know/just one of those things/go home and put your feet up with a cup of tea.
katipō in her mouth
I did once come out with a strange swelling in my mouth. It was at first attributed to an allergic reaction to whitebait/inanga — which is as innofensive a fish as you could imagine — although the Consultant rather suspected a bone had managed to penetrate a major blood vessel. (The ED Junior was delighted to announce that the whitebait was a red herring.)
I like the show, but, even though Debbie was killed by a mechanical injection of collected venom rather than one bite, wouldn’t the live katipo that was found in her mouth have also stung her, and then super pathologist Gina would have noticed that reaction? Huh? Huh?
Hah! Found a Welsh one (“the Yr Wyddfa Massif”):
https://getoutside.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/guides/yr-wyddfa-expert-route-guides/
There aren’t a lot of hits for the string “the Yr Wyddfa”, though. Conceivably, the place lacks the allure of a tar pit.
“The Yr Wyddfa Massif” should be a Welsh rap group, really. Something for the yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol …
necrotising arachnidism
That’s the worst arachnidism.
Incidentally in Peter Jackson’s movies, Shelob is modelled on the New Zealand tunnel web spider . If you click through and see the images they will be very triggering for arachnophobes, but the spiders themselves are quite small by international standards. It’s a nice inside joke.
Katipo. It’s such a cute-sounding poisonous spider that bites you in your sleep. Like kitty-cat. I almost wouldn’t mind. “I’ve been bitten by a katipo!”
OMG cattypoos!
The giant spider people in A Deepness in the Sky think that humans are adorable, because they have to turn their heads to see behind them, just like baby giant spider people.
@Stephen J: I sat all the way through Peter Jackson’s travesty of The Two Towers because I thought it would at least be worth the ticket price to see Shelob. There was nothing “nice” about anything of that.
The Sumatran rat-monkey in Braindead / Dead Alive is more my thing.
Braindead
A true classic. Jackson was never to attain that level again.
“I kick arse for the LORD!”
Epic.
Sorry to keep popping up, but that ō sound is a long pure vowel which sounds like what many English speakers produce in “paw”. In my non-rhotic NZ English car-tea-paw is a fair approximation, with even stress but the last syllable (mora) of distinctly longer length, maybe 50% longer. (As a non-linguist IPA is too much for me, soz).
Popping up is encouraged by all right-thinking Hatters.
It is the glory of the Hattery, and lesser blogs can only marvel at it.
Thanks @Stephen, please do keep popping up.
This being LanguageHat, we’ve discussed the macron in te reo/Polynesian languages generally. And indeed that 2009 study I pasted from omitted macrons throughout.
‘distinctly longer length’ is phonemic: kati ‘to bite’ is distinct from kāti ‘stop! enough!’; pōpō ‘pat/soothe/knead’ is distinct from popo ‘rotten/decayed’. (Which illustrates that doubling the vowel rather than putting a macron is going to be … problematic.)
(Not that I can claim to be a speaker of te reo, nor even that much of an Aotearoa-dweller, having lived here only 30 years.)
Here’s the thing.
Native speakers don’t need vowel length indications at all. The first stabs at an orthography didn’t consistently indicate it because all the readers didn’t need it to.
People learning later in life do, especially if they are learning mostly from written materials. Otherwise in speech they will mix up keke (cake) and kēkē (armpit).
But beyond that, the orthography that uses aa instead of ā (still used by many Tainui people) doesn’t give you good hints about underlying meanings. Eg if you know that long vowels in a mora are always indicated with a macron, and you see ātaahua , you pronounce it the same as ātāhua but you know that it’s ata + āhua etymologically.
The macron is usually called tohutō (a sign) but i know a people who call it pōtae (a hat).
I don’t recall hearing anyone object to “the Las Vegas airport”, “the Le Mans circuit”, etc.
That got me thinking of another issue. Are there any „native“ English villages/towns that take a definite article? Or that exist in a plural form? I can‘t think of any offhand.
Do you mean of England, or more generally English language ones? The Dalles in Oregon comes to mind.
I wrote a comment and then the site crashed when I tried to post it, so apologies if it turns up twice.
Plenty in Gaelic – Na Manaichean, Na Hearadh, An Gearasdan, An t-Oban – but those all seem to be indefinite in English.
There are areas – the Trossachs, the Cairngorms, the Cotswolds (to finally hit an English example!), and areas of cities – the Shambles, the Old Town…
(Inconsistently, the two Scottish national parks are ‘Cairngorms National Park’ and ‘Loch Lomond and the Troassachs National Park’.)
My paper UK atlas lists four English villages called simply The Green, plus The Forstal, The Headland, The Hill, The Lee, The Middles, The Moor, The Mumbles, The Reddings, The Stocks and The Strand in England, and The Den, The Lochs, The Murray, The Neuks and The Ross in Scotland.
The Headland is the only one of those I actually know – it’s an area of Hartlepool that I walked all round as part of my wanderings along the east coast.
An Ordnance Survey search brings up a long list of names, but some of them are ‘objects’ rather than places – the Something-or-Other Stone, the Such-and-Such Centre – and I’m not going through them all!
The Bronx. (El Bronx.)
P.S. Originally possessive -s, I gather, rather than plural.
@Xerib
Apparently from Bronck’s river (not sure how they know it is not the Broncks’ river). Here is a Dutch article which talks about the history and adds some links to documents, including a marriage certificate with (for me) funny letter shapes for letters r,v,w and z.
https://www.thedutchhistorian.nl/artikel/the-bronx-in-new-york-en-de-link-met-nederland
a definite article? Or that exist in a plural form?
The Shambles, in York — but I see @Jen got there first (it’s nearer from Edinburgh than from NZ).
Six Mile Bottom (Cambs) — debatable.
the Le Mans circuit — In “les 24 Heures du Mans”, the “Le” of Le Mans loses its capital when merged with “de” into “du”. IIRC one of Language Log’s posts on arthrousness discusses the tradeoff of between fidelity and grammaticality; here fidelity would be “de Le Mans”.
so few of us have enough Greek to parse it — In discussing the Irish Parliament, “in Dáil Éireann” is formal, “in the Dáil” informal, “in the Dáil Éireann” ungrammatical and a shibboleth. Even Irish people with no Irish usually know it is not idiomatic, but it would be unreasonable to expect foreigners to do so.
The Bronx
Of course! Damn, too obvious.
Funnily enough it seems to be almost always called “The Bronx” in Dutch, but in German it is generally “Die Bronx”. I guess Dutch are that much more comfortable with English than Germans are.
Why “Die Bronx” though? Question for David M. I suppose Germans think of it as a city and not “Ein Stadteil”. In Spanish it is “El Bronx” because it is a “condado”, not a “ciudad”. (Same in French “Le Bronx” – un arrondissement de New York).
Technically in German it should probably be neuter “Das Land von Bronck”, or more properly genitive neuter, “des Broncks Land”.
To quote wikipedia: “The Villages is a census-designated place (CDP) in Sumter and Marion counties in the U.S. state of Florida. It shares its name with a broader master-planned, age-restricted community that spreads into portions of Lake County.” But IMHO this just shows that modern real estate developers are not in practice constrained by traditional norms of propriety or idiomaticity.* Note the use of a singular verb (and pronoun) with the semantically-plural proper name. Idk if that’s how folks who live there habitually talk about the place or if the wiki article reflects the local dominance of some sort of quirky prescriptivist theory of the matter.
*What’s specifically unusual about this is taking a form of name typically applied by developers to an individual just-platted subdivision (fake example: “The Chateaus at Lake Pretension”) and carrying it over to a municipality or quasi-municipality.
“Die Bronx” presumably tracks that peculiarity of German toponymy in which names of most nation-states are neuter and anarthrous but some are feminine and arthrous, z.B. (back when I was learning this exception to the pattern) “die Tschechoslowakei.”
Welsh has quite a few. Names of countries may or may not take the article (Yr Alban “Scotland” but Lloegr “England”); towns mostly don’t, but with exceptions like Y Fenni “Abergavenny.”
@Vanya
Two ideas:
(1) if name originally applied to the river, then maybe feminine would be default;
(2) Since the area was not formerly a borough, maybe it was thought of as a Stadt, as you say, or a Gegend.
I was trying to think of named city sections that were not historically independent towns, villages or landmarks, but I keep coming up with either no article or a compound with article, e.g., die Bahnstadt (HD), das Bohnenviertel (SG) or das Hafenviertel (HH).
In “les 24 Heures du Mans”, the “Le” of Le Mans loses its capital when merged with “de” into “du”. IIRC one of Language Log’s posts on arthrousness discusses the tradeoff of between fidelity and grammaticality; here fidelity would be “de Le Mans”.
Fidelity to what?
When I got into Spanish, I had to learn that it doesn’t do that, as in de El Salvador, not to be confused with del Salvador ‘of the Savior’.
New Mexico has various place names with articles, some of them recent: El Duende ‘the dwarf’, El Guache ‘the lookout’ (from English “watch”), Los Montoyas (surnames not ending in s or z get plural suffixes in N. M. Spanish)… oh, wait, that wasn’t the question.
The Irish band A House tended to preserve its indefinite article in more contexts than the UK’s A Flock of Seagulls, because of the greater ambiguity of the articleless form. (A House was never a house band and did not play house music.)
You couldn’t very well say “I’m an A House fan,” so I guess it would be “a fan of A House.”
It doesn’t often have a capital in the first place. Maps often put articles in lowercase.
That’s not it. Cities never get an article in German; even the one of the Hague is simply denied and the name is rendered Den Haag, indeclinable, two uppercase letters.
Parts of cities or indeed villages that don’t have transparent compound names very, very, very rarely get an article, and the ones that do are basically only known to locals. Of the two examples I can think of, one is der Wedding in Berlin – and that article literally never appears on maps, so if you don’t live in Berlin, you never find out it exists.
No. Plenty of masculine rivers around; and Vienna is anarthrous emergency-neuter despite the homonymous feminine river.
In the end, I have no clue how die Bronx happened. Maybe it’s from the countries; there are masculine countries, but they’re younger as names in German – Iran, Irak, Jemen, Oman, and I think that’s it. (Transparent compounds with -gau remain masculine, but as established above that’s another story.)
de El Salvador
Very pertinent example! That demonstrates nicely how a definite article can lose its (morpho)syntactic status as an article when incorporated into a proper name, even within a single language. It’s like my “I don’t really get the The Onion’s sense of humour”, only better.
I think that’s really the key to all this (as Hat in fact implied); my point about slightly different senses of English “the” is a minor issue compared with that.
(Welsh doesn’t do it like Spanish, though: Cymru a’r Alban “Wales and Scotland”, not *Cymru ac yr Alban; o’r Fenni “from Y Fenni, from Abergavenny.”)
In the end, I have no clue how die Bronx happened.
Maybe it was something as dumb and obvious as „die” sounding more like stressed “the” than “der” or “das”? Especially in German immigrant speech in 19th century New York that wouldn’t have been surprising.
Are there any „native“ English villages/towns that take a definite article? Or that exist in a plural form?
There are plenty of doublets and triplets. For example, Long Wittenham and Little Wittenham, near where I grew up, can be referred to as the Wittenhams. But that’s cheating, I guess.
Not unlike the Quad Cities in the upper midwest.
A closer parallel to the Wittenhams might be New Jersey’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oranges.
In English meteorological talk (around the Pacific especially), “the El Niño” and “the La Niña” come up all the time.
Spanish WP anyway just uses Niño/a with no confusion with a child. It has instances of both “de El Niño” and “del Niño”.
It never struck me before, but river names in English always take “the.” Mountain and hill names generally don’t (though hill ranges do), so it’s not a general “geographical feature” thing. Lakes generally don’t, either, but on the other hand their names usually incorporate some actual word for “lake” explicitly. “Loch Ness”, “Windermere.”
These things are easier in Kusaal. Personal and place names never take the article, and there aren’t any river names at all.
@David Eddyshaw: It’s not quite always with river names.* Sometimes an adjective blocks the article, as in “Great Avren” or “Mother Ganges.” Direct address vocatives in English (almost?) never take an article, hence the personification, “Roll on, Columbia….” And there are towns “on” rivers, where the river names are typically anarthous: “Rostov on Don,” “Annondale on Hudson.”****
* Obviously, flows that are pragmatically rivers sometimes have “creek,” “flow,” “burn,” etcetera appended to their names, which generally** blocks them from getting articles.
** There are a lot of minor waterways named “Battle Creek,” but also a few called “the Battle Creek.” The Creek in the back of my friend Joe’s yard was Waln*** Creek, which was named after the first farmer in the immediate area. It ran into Battle Creek, but there had been no battle there.
*** Street names in Ironwood Estates were given picturesque “-wood” names, but during the initial construction, they used names of real trees. The weird exception was the cul-de-sac where I lived, named “Walnwood Court.”
**** That thorp is a post office at an intersection, but the addresses include the adjacent Bard College.
You couldn’t very well say “I’m an A House fan,” — I’m sure you couldn’t, but if one was such a fan then one could and did. Sifting through false ghits I find
— band member Fergal Bunbury saying “I have spent 25 years saying NO to an A House reunion”
— a Facebook group named “The A House Appreciation Society” (!) with a post beginning “This is an A House interview I scanned from Sounds (2/6/90), which was written by Jim Carroll.”
It’s true that the A received more emphasis in speech than a normal article; pre-hiatus distinguished “I’m going to see A House” from “I’m going to see a house”. Nature Finds A Way.
@Brett:
OK: epicycle time!
Single word river names always take the article …
In particular, river names that incorporate an actual word for “river” generally don’t, as you say. The “Loch Ness” phenomenon again. “Beverley Brook” … (memorable as an actual character in Ben Aaronovitch’s excellent “Rivers of London” series.)
‘Flow gently sweet Afton’ and ‘Ye Banks and Braes o Bonnie Doon’.
But ‘Fog on the Tyne’ and ‘Ferry cross the Mersey’ and ‘Song of the Clyde’, on the other side.
I’m sure you couldn’t, but if one was such a fan then one could and did.
I stand corrected!
German lake names all take the masculine article because they all end in -see. We’ve even turned Balaton (1 of 1.1 lakes in Hungary) into Plattensee.
Why not.
Apparently “the River Great Ouse” is standard. “Great River Ouse” is poetic~jocular.
– Iran, Irak, Jemen, Oman, and I think that’s it.
Also der Kongo, and I think I’ve seen der Senegal referring to the country, not the river.
der Kongo
Anarthrousness of country names in English seems to be increasing over time.
“The Congo” was once common; perhaps from the river, or reduced from “the Belgian Congo.”
“The Argentine” for “Argentina” was common too (still arthrous in Welsh: Yr Ariannin.)
“The Ukraine” was normal in my youth, though now deprecated for reasons I have never entirely quite followed, and which seem linguistically naive to me. But if Ukrainians want us to say “Ukraine”, I am happy to oblige.
“The Sudan”, too. And “the Gold Coast”, of course, and “the Ivory Coast.” (Never “the Upper Volta”, though.) My ever-dodgy Sprachgefühl suggests that there may have been an implicature with these African ones that you’re talking about a mere geographical expression rather than a proper country (as with Italy, back in the day.) On reflection, that’s probably at the back of the Ukrainian objections to “the” as well.
Die Bronx
Apparently די בראָנקס di Bronks in Yiddish too. Google Books turned up a quote from Morris Rosenfeld I liked:
But then I thought, shouldn’t it be fun der Bronks ‘from the Bronx’ with the dative, rather than fun di Bronks? So the di there is just an adaptation of the English the, not really the Yiddish definite article? Some googling seems to indicate this is so, although maybe there is varying usage. In this video, the speaker seems to me to use the English pronunciation embedded in Yiddish, after around 0:41. (I thought that it might be that di Bronks is (was?) sometimes taken as plural, from its form, so we could find plural fun di that way? But it seems to be squarely די בראָנקס איז di Bronks iz.) I’d love to hear more from experts.
My ever-dodgy Sprachgefühl suggests that there may have been an implicature with these African ones that you’re talking about a mere geographical expression rather than a proper country (as with Italy, back in the day.) On reflection, that’s probably at the back of the Ukrainian objections to “the” as well.
Absolutely, and they’re quite right.
ריווינגיטאָן not ריווינגטאָן?
I thought I fixed that OCR error.
Yes, it should be ריווינגטאָן .
I’ve fixed it.
In particular, river names that incorporate an actual word for “river” generally don’t
Now this is interesting – I say ‘the Gogar Burn’, ‘the Braid Burn’ but ‘Maize Beck’, ‘Mosedale Beck’. I’ve never noticed that before.
Thanks for fixing that, Hat. Here is my attempt at recovering the Google Books hit that I OCR’d the quote from. It’s not clear whether this is actually Rosenfeld’s prose from the snippet, and the metadata is screwed up, since Rosenfeld was born in 1862.
I am still interested in the non-inflection of di in di Bronks.
Apparently not sprachgefuehling the same implicature as Ukrainians are hypothesized to, the official position of The Republic of The Gambia is that “The Gambia” is the proper and arthrous name of their country. In practice we seem to mostly disregard their wishes and just call it “Gambia.”
Possibly “the” because the country pretty much is the river.
A House
the bands called The The and The Band pose similar quandries. (i’ve always found some fans insistence on “Pixies” rather than “the Pixies” kinda pretentious)
for decades, there was also a (much mourned) bar called The Bar on second avenue in the east village.
The Oranges
new jersey, for some reason, is particularly prone to this form (there are also The Caldwells and various others). although much of the northeastern u.s. is prone to clusters of town names differentiated by direction, age, and so on, aside from The Hamptons, i’m not sure there are many sets outside of jersey that are usually talked about that way.
di bronks
alas, i’ve got nothing to offer here. but i’ll keep it in mind, and try to find mentions of our mainland borough!
It’s not clear to me what the Potteries means. Is it one area, or six towns, or several hundred potteries? I guess the answer is, “yes”.
DE:
On reflection, that’s probably at the back of the Ukrainian objections to “the” as well.
Hat:
Absolutely, and they’re quite right.
Yes, the Ukrainians are right to prefer no “the”. I’ve seen a Russian write (as an aside to an online game of chess) “украинцы — не люди”. I understand this to be more chilling even than “не народ” or “не нация”. Apologies for my shaky Russian.
Anyway, compare embedded treatments of [the] UK and [the] US, and their spelt-out forms too.
Türkiye, on the other hand, does not win my endorsement. For one thing, journalists in Australia (at least) stress the first or second syllable at random; and one seldom hears the “ü” given its intended value. The latest manifestation of our national indifference to consistency, let alone propriety, is the equally indifference with which journalists say “antisemitic” or “antisemetic”. We often hear both uttered in the same breath.
Damn: equally > equal.
I’ve loved the band (the) Swirlies for over 30 years now (& I just saw them a few months ago & they were about as good as I remember them being the last time I saw them, in the early or mid 90s), and I’ve always called them “the Swirlies”, but apparently this is very wrong. Maybe it’s a Boston thing?
And how about A Certain Ratio? I’m not a big fan, but I think they’re good. I have no idea how they or real fans pronounce the name, but I say the unstressed version of the article in my head, and I would still say “are you going to the /ə/ Certain Ratio show?”, if I had the chance to ask such a question.
Folks bands seem to incline to ‘the’ – the Dubliners, the Poozies, the Tannahill Weaves, the Mary Wallopers, the Boys of the Lough – but tend not to be fussy about capitalisation.
The Kinks, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Clash, the Fall … the Wailers …
But the “the” is not tightly incorporated into the name: you don’t say *the sought-after The Beatles sound.” Actually, I think you might do that with “the Fall.” Dunno.
But most of them seem to work like “the Government.”
Now this is interesting – I say ‘the Gogar Burn’, ‘the Braid Burn’ but ‘Maize Beck’, ‘Mosedale Beck’. I’ve never noticed that before.
Isn’t this because we’re treating the first part of the name as a specifying adjective? For those of us in Edinburgh, “burn” is a very familiar word for a small river, so we might refer to “the burn”. But which burn? The Braid burn to be specific. For me “beck” is much less of a standard word (though I’d know it meant much the same as “burn”), so I’m more inclined to hear “Mosedale Beck” as a single name, rather than a noun with a specifier.
As for band names, there is of course “The The” https://www.thethe.com/
DE reminded me that it’s also der Sudan in German. I think I’ve also seen der Gambia. As for Ukraine, it used to be die Ukraine up to the war, and lots of people still use that, many of them out of habit, but some also signal their support for the Russian side by this.
@ mollymooly
I’m not sure either and I’m from there.
I may not be sure now but as a boy, 60 years ago, it was pretty clear. The Potteries was the urban sprawl covered by the dense smoke of pottery factories (potbanks) whose spluttering inhabitants had a distinctive regional dialect. Now almost all the factories have gone and the accent has changed. My linguistic observation is based solely on a couple of Youtube videos I’ve watched here in my batcave in rural France, so I could be wrong, but the people interviewed (poor souls addicted to Monkey Dust) never say ‘thee’ or ‘thine’ or even ‘dust?’ in the sense of ‘do you?’.
Also, locals now seem to call themselves ‘Stokies’ as opposed to ‘Potters’. What is the world coming to.
Interestingly in Polish and Russian the borough is simply “Bronx/Bronks”, not “Zi Bronks” or some approximation. Similarly Den Haag in Polish is simply “Haga”, no article, and “El Salvador” is simply “Salwador”. But “Le Mans” remains “Le Mans” in Polish and Russian, as does “El Paso”. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of consistency, other than a funny consistency between Slavic languages as to which locations keep articles as part of their intrinsic nomenclature and which don’t.
My paper UK atlas lists four English villages called simply The Green, plus The Forstal, The Headland, The Hill, The Lee, The Middles, The Moor, The Mumbles, The Reddings, The Stocks and The Strand in England, and The Den, The Lochs, The Murray, The Neuks and The Ross in Scotland.
If you look at the Wikipedia entries, all the singular forms lose their articles – Forstal, Headland, Ross, etc. The plural forms all remain arthrous.
Yes to der Sudan, der Kongo, der Senegal. No idea actually about Gambia, except I didn’t expect it to be The Gambia in English.
I’ve never seen anarthrous Ukraine in German, however, or any plea to adopt it. After all, the English implication of the article is just not there.
…which is why titles prefixed by The Honourable The shocked me so much.
And how about A Certain Ratio?
An interesting case: I would certainly not leave off the “A,” and I suspect that that’s because the phrase is so tightly linked together. “Certain Ratio” by itself just sounds stupid.
I daresay that many who were not already habituated to the recording artist’s name by prior exposure might think “A Certain Ratio” likewise sounds stupid, at least as the name for a musical act. (The name may be better than the resultant music – it alludes to / borrows from the lyrics to Brian Eno’s arthrously-titled “The True Wheel,” which I have discovered by experiment is one of his best songs for encouraging toddlers to dance – once he got into his “ambient” period there was no toddler-danceability.)
You can FWIW find some use of “Ukrainia” in English-language texts back around the WWI-and-aftermath era. Parallel to the “Ucrainia” used by various Romance languages, clearly anarthrous, and sounds like the name of a country, just like Ruritania and Vulgaria do. Perhaps a mistake to have abandoned it.
If you look at the Wikipedia entries, all the singular forms lose their articles – Forstal, Headland, Ross, etc. The plural forms all remain arthrous.
The area of Scotland called Ross is completely separate from the village at the edge of Comrie called The Ross.
Otherwise see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barkip (alternatively The Den)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keevil (including The Strand)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murray,_East_Kilbride
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkhurst (including The Moor)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lee
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbles but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mumbles_Lifeboat_Station
So not as simple as that, although Forstal and Headland do seem happy either way.
Ukrainia, Azerbaidzhan, Kirghizia, Tadzhikistan… could be back in fashion any day now.
Back to [the] Gambia: as noted above I’m interested in the inconsistent acquiescence in practice by Anglophone writers to the government’s official arthrous preference. I glanced at the first 100 hits for “gambia” in COCA, discarded things that were e.g. references to “the Gambia River” and also multiple consistent usages in the same source document (of which there were a lot) and came up with 18 sources that used “[T/h]e Gambia” and 25 that used anarthrous “Gambia,” including a handful where maybe the article was blocked by an adjective (e.g. “in rural Gambia”).
It’s difficult to tell, but things might be even more skewed than that suggests, as some of the the-using instances were from sources like the U.S. State Dep’t website that might have a higher-than-average tendency to self-conscious prescriptivism on this matter.
*The arthrous hits varied as to whether or not they capitalized “[T/t]he” when not in sentence-initial position.
That is the case in Germany, where the ministry in question has long had an official policy of making Iran & Iraq anarthrous. Almost nobody else follows.
I wonder if this could be due to the influence of English?
“de El Salvador”
Very pertinent example! That demonstrates nicely how a definite article can lose its (morpho)syntactic status as an article when incorporated into a proper name, even within a single language. It’s like my “I don’t really get the The Onion’s sense of humour”, only better.
Could I possibly detect the elegant hand of the Royal Academy here? They like distinctions.
Your Onion example isn’t grammatical for me. If I heard someone say it, I’d think they were being facetious. I think the only band where I might use an article before the “the” is the The.
Where was it one first heard the truth? —Wallace Stevens
I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, that there were bands whose names started with the English indefinite article. Just to be inconsistent, I’d probably use articles before those names.
A Certain Ratio
A Split Second, too (though i quite definitely pronounce their name with [ej] rather than [ə]). i can’t speak with any authority about A Flock of Seagulls, since i don’t really have occasion to talk about them.
i’ve heard The Magnetic Fields talked about with and without their article; their merchandise abbreviates them TMF.
Kusaal syntax could potentially lead to two instances of its postposed la “the” in succession (by including a noun with the article as the last element in a relative clause with the article, for example), but one of them is always dropped when that happens.
German is cool with two articles in succession, though: die dem Wind abgekehrte Seite.
Three identical articles in a row (with a comma after the first) is a common occurrence in German – though the first is actually a demonstrative pronoun and the second a relative one: die, die die “the ones who [$verb] the [pl./f.]”…
“bands whose names started with the English indefinite article. ”
A Flock Of Seagulls comes to mind for this 80s teen.
die dem Wind abgekehrte Seite.
die, die die “the ones who [$verb] the [pl./f.]”
For example: die, die die dem Wind abgekehrte Seite bevorzugen. Easier to understand than “the ones who [$verb] the [pl./f.]”-
Perfect! I’m just bad at coming up with examples. ^_^
“bands whose names started with the English indefinite article. ”
A Flock Of Seagulls comes to mind for this 80s teen.
See also the hip hop group, A Tribe Called Quest.
I certainly should have come up with both of those. See David M. on coming up with examples. I don’t feel that I’d refer to either of those groups diarthrously.
I wouldn’t swear I’ve ever heard a Flock of Seagulls song, though I was subjected to more of that style than I wanted. This may say all there is to say about them: the only three words following case-sensitive “Flock of Seagulls” that Google Ngrams thought worth mentioning were, in descending order, “haircut”, “and”, and “hair”.
(There weren’t enough hits for me to see what came before the phrase.)
That that I say is this: that that that that gentleman has advanced, is not that that he should have proved (1711, The Spectator — punctuation and capitalisation modernised )
Just thinking about how one can use the indefinite article to denote an example. “Modern classical music needs a Mozart”. I think I would resort to paraphrase before I said “Modern music lacks an A Flock of Seagulls”.
I wouldn’t swear I’ve ever heard a Flock of Seagulls song
Although I was very much around in the 80s, I neither had heard of that band nor a song of theirs before I watched La La Land.
I wouldn’t swear I’ve ever heard a Flock of Seagulls song,
oooooooooooh. Examples of treating the article as meaningful and not a calque in the wild, trotting into this very discussion!
Wouldn’t that be “I wouldn’t swear I’ve ever heard an A Flock of Seagulls song”?
Actually, I probably would say that myself, though Heisenberg’s Principle creates some doubt in my mind.
I’m actually fairly certain that I’ve never heard an A Flock of Seagulls song. We are a simple people here in Wales, content with our Male Voice Choirs and our little saucepans.
A Tribe Called Quest
who i thiiiiink i heard referred to as just “Tribe” in their heyday. which only says so much, because my circles didn’t include many serious hiphop heads.
o, and there’s the group formerly known as A Tribe Called Red (named in tribute to the earlier project) but now called The Halluci Nation, preserving the linguistic gesture.
and then there’s Das Racist, who, like sideways-name-inspiration Das EFX, don’t actually have an article in their name, they just look like it.
If there’s not a band called Die Bart Die, there should be.
I wouldn’t swear I’ve ever heard a Flock of Seagulls song — grammatical and idiomatic
I wouldn’t swear I’ve ever heard an A Flock of Seagulls song — grammatical if somewhat less idiomatic
I wouldn’t swear I’ve ever heard A Flock of Seagulls song — ungrammatical or misspelt
I read The New York Times — correct
I read the New York Times — correct
I read the New York Times — incorrect
I do The New York Times crossword — incorrect
I do the New York Times crossword — correct
more multilingual grist for the mill, found in the wild, though from 1982:
“…this is what the Di Vilde Chayes statement does do.”
Di Vilde Chayes was a jewish feminist group of the time (i don’t think i’ve seen any writing where they give their name in oysyes rather than transcription).
I’ve never been to an à;GRUMH… show.
I have been to the El Rio, a club in San Francisco. Everybody calls it that.
@mollymooly:
I read the New York Times — correct
Also:
I found a New York Times on the bus — OK.
I find the New York Times boring — OK.
But:
I find The New York Times boring — not so OK?
THERE IS, AFTER ALL, MUCH TO BE SAID FOR ALL CAPS.
(Years ago, I came across a textbook for teaching EFL which used ALL CAPS throughout, as making life easier for learners unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet. It seemed quite sensible in other respects: weird that it should have alighted on this as a significant obstacle to acquiring English, compared with – well, almost anything else.)
We are a simple people here in Wales, content with our Male Voice Choirs and our little saucepans.
So lots of fans of Ted Nugent, or at least of “Cat Scratch Fever”?
I know nothing of this “Nugent” of whom you speak. Ond, mae’r gath wedi sgrapo Sioni bach; mae’n wir …
Cat Scratch Fever is an actual (quite nasty) thing; though less epic than my Favourite Disease Name of All Time*, viz Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (which cries out to be commemorated in song, either Blues or Bluegrass.)
* Followed by Histiocytosis X, the perfect B Movie late-night horror, set on the fabled Islets of Langerhans. One by one, the cast succumb to the dreaded Necrotising Arachnidism …
This is, in fact, one of my main objections to the Greek alphabet as used in maths and so on – I think I’ve got used to what a delta or whatever looks like, and then suddenly have to learn that it looks completely different when it grows up. But I expect I’d get over it quickly enough if I wanted to learn to read Greek.
(My main main objection is that they never seem to tell you what the letters are *called*, so I find myself trying to read an equation that goes ‘thing-like-a-dowsing-rod equals ….’)
On country names, Lebanon is another country that used to have “The” as a prefix in media in times past, though I’ve not heard it described as such for many decades now. A village where I used to live near Tralee in Kerry is known as “The Spa”, primarily to distinguish it from an unarticled townland of the same name located just outside Killarney.
they never seem to tell you what the letters are *called*
They don’t in Scotland? Maths lessons is actually where I learnt the names of the first couple of Greek letters, long before I happened on a complete list in a dictionary.
Lebanon
Still der Libanon in German.
As I recall, we started learning Greek before we actually got round to maths that was so fancy that it had Greek letters in. Apart from π, maybe. And ε, I suppose, but nobody read that as “epsilon.”
On country names, Lebanon is another country that used to have “The” as a prefix in media in times past, though I’ve not heard it described as such for many decades now.
There’s a discussion of that here. (N.b.: #11 has a discussion of Welsh usage.)
And ε, I suppose, but nobody read that as “epsilon.”
Well, don’t be so mysterious about it. How was it read out, if not as “epsilon” ?
I was going to mention the Human League song — “And who will have won/ When the soldiers have gone/ From the* Lebanon?” (*Dunno if The is capitalised in the Official Lyrics)
Wikipedia says the lyrics were in 2007 voted 9th in a readers poll held by BBC 6 Music on the “worst lyrics of all time” but the impugned lyrics were not the preceding but rather “Before he leaves the camp he stops/ He scans the world outside/ And where there used to be some shops/ Is where the snipers sometimes hide”
Paul Erdős called children “epsilons”, because they were small.
@Hat:
A lot of Welsh country names that take the article do indeed begin with a vowel, but beside Y Ffindir there are also Y Swisdir and Y Philipinau. However, a lot of others with the article are like the English thing of the article being triggered by a modifier of the head, like Y Traeth Ifori. And I suppose Y Swisdir and Y Ffindir could be analysed similarly, while the Philippines are “really” Ynysoedd y Philipinau, like “the Philippine Islands.”
Hm.
Never noticed that before. Coincidence? I suppose a former y (article before a consonant) would be more readily dropped over time than yr, so I can even imagine a mechanism. (Such a loss has actually happened in the expression yn Gymraeg “in Welsh.”)
Town names show no such pattern, though: e.g. Y Barri, Y Gelli “Hay.”
There are quite a few country names beginning with a vowel that don’t take the article, but you could probably argue that they are mostly more recent arrivals in Welsh than Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Italy etc:
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwledydd_y_byd
How was it read out, if not as “epsilon” ?
“Is an element of.”
Oh yes. The mountain range and the country.
Huh. Evans’ Grammar of Middle Welsh actually addresses this specifically, saying that names of countries beginning with a vowel usually take the article (it also has yr Affric) but those beginning with a consonant rarely do.
“Ireland” actually turns up as just plain Iwerd(d)on in the Four Branches already, oddly enough.
So: well spotted, ed.pendragon. You’re quite right. I never noticed that before.
Ah the set membership symbol ∈ evolved from lunate ϵ which is a variant of the lowercase ε of analysis and Erdős. AFAIK the latter two are always called “epsilon” in maths.
@David Eddyshaw Most Irish-language country names tend to be direct translations from the English – “An Ghearmáin”, “An Fhrainc” etc, but Scotland and England (Albain, Sasana) have original names, and the Czech Republic takes the genitive form (Poblacht *na* Seice “Republic of the Czechs). Another exception, curiously, is Newfoundland, which in Irish is called “Talamh an Éisc” (the fishing ground).
Irish seems a lot keener on articles with country names than Welsh, in general, to judge by the Irish WP page – especially older ones.
Though it lacks it in some old names where Welsh has it, like Albain versus Yr Alban.
Possibly my favourite country name in Gaelic is an Eilbhis, Switzerland, which must be a form of Helvetia.
There are a lot of names that are very obviously transliterations from English, but I’m not sure if an Fhraing is necessarily one of them – could it have come from Latin with the ‘hard’ c?
All the continents are vowel-initial, but they go
Yr Amerig, yr Affrig, yr Antarctig, Ewrop, Asia, Awstralia.
Yr Antarctig is obviously just like “the Antarctic”, a nouned adjective; leaving that aside, it looks like the properly Welshified ones get subsumed under the general names-of-countries rule, while the more unassimilated ones don’t. And America, Affrica are indeed anarthrous.
could it have come from Latin with the ‘hard’ c?
Looks like a borrowing via Brythonic to me: cf Welsh Ffrainc.
Oh, quite possibly – older than a modern English borrowing, anyway. A’ Ghearmailt too – -aidh is so common an ending in Gaelic that there would be no reason not to use if it if you were coming directly from English ‘Germany’.
Eilbheis Preaslaidh …
(Or Preislidh, to keep the Sean Connery vibe more consistently?)
There’s a definite epenthetic vowel – it makes me think more of uilebheist!
But Eilvéis in Irish and Elveeish in Manx, which is starting to look a bit Tolkein.
He was the King. (In this case, Oberon.)