To anyone who believe Putin’s right hand is controlling Trump’s mouth:I know where Putin’s left hand is — allow me to introduce German AfD party leader Alice Weidel.The full interview with this Kremlin proxy is mind-blowingly scary — especially from 18:00 where she starts unfolding her Kremlin script about Ukraine.If you want to know what happens if she and Marine Le Pen in France get the power, watch the full video here:youtu.be/_cGGDu8sgXY
i suppose so, but calling it ukraine without an article in german just seems off to me. i don’t like saying it, it feels wrong, and speech is often about vibes. in english I’m perfectly fine calling it ukraine. i guess it’ll take a few years for me to adapt.
The vibes of “the Ukraine” are that it’s a region rather than a self-sovereign country. That’s why there’s been a push to stop adding the the.
I understand it, but as a citizen from “The Netherlands” it has always felt a bit weird.
i see, that makes sense
Still, I think you are right. In German we put those articles for some Countries… including USA.
Well USA actually contains the word “The” when you expand the acronym.
If not officially, then at the very least by necessity of the English language
For English it’s true that calling it “the Ukraine” feels like you’re talking about a region instead of a country, because that’s the (historical) reason for the article. So in English “the” does have that implication.
In German however, we use the article for very different, purely grammatical reasons: Every noun in German has one of three gramatical genders, that have nothing to do with its physical nature. A pouch isn’t more male than a bag, but nonetheless, we say “der Beutel” and “die Tüte”. The same applies to country names. Some are male (der Iran), some are neutral (das Syrien) and some are female (die Türkei). And for countries that are neutral, you just leave out the article in almost every case1. It has nothing to do with wether something is a region or an independent country.
A good illustration of this: In German the same country can sometimes be refered to in two different ways with two different genders. “Die USA2” is female*, “Das Amerika” is neutral. So you would say “ich fahre nach Amerika” but “ich fahre in die USA”. Or an even more obvious case: The Netherlands are often called “Holland” in German, even though Holland is just one region in the Netherlands. But Holland is neutral and Niederlande female. So we say “ich fahre nach Holland” but “ich fahre in die Niederlande”. Here the country has the article, while the region does not.
1 In some cases the neutral article shows again. For example, if you’re talking about a specific version of a country: “Das Frankreich der 50er-Jahre” or “Das Spanien unter Franco”
2 The USA are female because they are plural, and every plural is female in German – “Der Mann” but “die Männer” – showing that gramatical gender has no physical reasoning.