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One example in Bernese Oberland I like: There's a ski resort Lenk. People say they live «in the Lenk» or they travel «to the Lenk». In German you have to know t
by _nalply 6y ago
One example in Bernese Oberland I like: There's a ski resort Lenk. People say they live «in the Lenk» or they travel «to the Lenk». In German you have to know that the genus of «Lenk» is femimine and use the dative or the accusative: «in der Lenk» or «zur Lenk».
That's very weird but even to me omitting the article and preposition sounds wrong. By the way «to the» is contracted from the long for «zu der» to «zur».
Compared to «Frankfurt am Main» there's no specification of a river or something else. It's just the location name where the article and preposition is often required.
- lorenzhs 6y agoIt's the same with some countries' names. Switzerland always has a female article in German: you can spend your vacation in France ("in Frankreich") but Switzerland requires an article ("in der Schweiz"). Same with Iran and Iraq, which always require a male article, and some plural countries (Netherlands, US). Note that the full list is quite a bit longer: https://deutschtraining.org/deutsche-grammatik/artikel/laender-mit-artikel/ https://deutschtraining.org/deutsche-grammatik/artikel/laend...
- gumby 6y agoTypically the origin of such toponyms is in abbreviation of a designator (as happened for example with den Haag, where the full name is still survives in official documents), rather than proper noun, where the abbreviation becomes a proper noun. In English this rarely survives except for odd cases such as The City of London (which is a small, legally distinct entity from what most people refer to as London). English is happy to drop articles when they don't reduce ambiguity, hence countries (Austria, Scotland, but retained in the descriptive name The United States of America) or Bend, Oregon (a case similar to Lenk).