Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 June 12

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June 12

Ivory Coast

Why do we say, "Flag of Ivory Coast" and not "Flag of the Ivory Coast?? This is inconsistent with other countries with names based on common nouns. Georgia guy (talk) 16:21, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

I've combed through the list of alternative country names to see how unusual this is, and investigated some countries a bit further, and the answer is, it's not very unusual.

• The Bahamas (official), Bahama Islands (colloquial)
• Congo, the Congo
• Czechia has apparently had alternate names "Czechland" and "the Czechlands"
• Gambia, the Gambia
• Lebanon, the Lebanon (not used much any more)
• Maldives, the Maldives
• Niger, the Niger
• The Netherlands - our article forgets to use the definite article in 12 places.

On the other hand:

• The Comoros (doesn't ever seem to be called "Comoros")
• "the Philippines" = our article names of the Philippines says When standing alone in English, the country's name is always preceded by the article the.

So those are the unusual cases, not Ivory Coast (which would officially like us to call it Côte d'Ivoire, anyway).  Card Zero  (talk) 17:28, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

This paper found "Ivory Coast" was preceded by the definite article one third of the time. Nardog (talk) 17:34, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

The official name of Ivory Coast is République de Côte d'Ivoire, without definite article, which would be République de la Côte d'Ivoire. But when the country is referred to in French by a shorter name, it is invariably as la Côte d'Ivoire, also on the government's website.^[1] This is not something special for Ivory Coast; most country names have an obligatory article in French, such as la France, le Japon, le Liban, la Suisse. The Republic of The Gambia always uses the article as part of its name, whether in the full form or in the shorter form. I think this is an exception for the short-form name of an (officially) English-speaking country, except when the name is a plural (Commonwealth of The Bahamas). In these cases, the article is part of the name and should be written with a capital letter T. Using "the Congo" may evoke associations with a history of brutal colonialism and is best avoided.  --Lambiam 22:06, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

This article says that "If it is a group of islands, use the... If the name is taken from a geographical feature, you should use the... This last one is declining though." Alansplodge (talk) 11:25, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

If it's a plural, it gets a determiner: The Bahamas, Maldives, Philippines, United States of America, United Arab Emirates, Netherlands – that last one has locally been singular for two centuries, but in foreign languages it's often still plural. If named after some river or other geographical feature or some descriptive noun, it's inconsistent. The river Congo, the river Niger, the river Gambia, the river Suriname, the river Senegal, the Lebanon mountains, the western Sahara desert, the united kingdom, the land of the Irish, the land of ice (and fire), the mark of the Danes, the coast where one finds ivory. I suppose it depends on how well people realise where the name comes from and how used they are to seeing such compounds as proper names. If the name ends in land, you never see a determiner. PiusImpavidus (talk) 20:04, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Côte d'Ivoire, when used in English, is never preceded by the article. It might be less common and more "foreign", but at least spares you that dilemma. --Theurgist (talk) 22:36, 15 June 2022 (UTC)