> Its The United States of America not United States of America. And its The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not United Kingdom of Great B

> Its The United States of America not United States of America. And its The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. You can argue if The is technically part of the name or not but its always used. The author seems to forget that definitive articles are often used to denote proper nouns in English. But those two are an exception, and AFAICS that's probably because they're not actually ordinary proper nouns -- they're noun phrases, where the main word is a common noun: The United Kingdom and The United States. There are no other nations with the same constituent words so you can't talk about a United Kingdom. And if there were it wouldn't make sense to talk of any United States; there's only one of each, so it's "the" one. > Having said that, I've always called it just Ukraine. But that's because that's what I heard it called first. The other way around for me (in English, that is), and I can still see that as defensible on grounds of linguistic conservatism: This constant changing of names of stuff, usually for reasons of "political correctness", is often damn silly and gets exceedingly tiresome after a while. But in this case, I'm working on dropping the "the". It's not really all that hard, when one limits it to actually deserving cases.