> There are no multiple Philippines - there's only one. Yet we should say "The Philippines", while we cannot say "The Switzerland." I think kaoD's point is tha

> There are no multiple Philippines - there's only one. Yet we should say "The Philippines", while we cannot say "The Switzerland." I think kaoD's point is that islands, states and lakes are not unique entities, so "the" does designate a particular instance of a class in these examples. I think he might have a point: your three examples are proper nouns that happen to include "the", and they evolved from "definite article (+ attributive) + noun", where the definite article was used to pick out a particular instance of a class.