[Mesorah] Fw: Heh Hayedia

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

To continue the specific point of Ha-Ai, I'd like to offer several other data points, regarding locations whose English names may or may not include the definite article:

THE HAGUE - According to Wikipedia, this city is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. But the officieal name of that city is "'s-Gravenhage" (including both the apostrophe and the hyphen), and "Den Haag" is merely... I guess it is some sort of nickname. But it is significant to note that when I googled "hague" and "the hague", almost every citation included "The", capitalized. Notable exceptions were when the place name was used as an adjective, in phrases such as
-- the Hague Conference on Private International Law
-- the Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century

THE BRONX - I was very surprised to find that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronx contains nothing whatsoever about whether or not the name should include "the". It turns out that this is because the matter was discussed (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Bronx/Name) with no consensus ever being reached. I did not read that entire discussion, but one point did jump out at me, and that is:

THE UNITED STATES - Why do we spend so much time wondering about the Bronx, yet I never noticed how we refer to this country. I can't imagine any case where I would verbally mention "United States" with having "the" precede it. One exception in writing would be signage, such as the card in front of the UN ambassador, which simply reads "United States". Before posting, I reviewed this paragraph with my wife, who pointed out that it probably applies equally well to the United Kingdom.

Akiva Miller

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