[David Muller]

I came across this article on the net recently. It does not solve the problem it raises but emphasises that sometimes you have to be a native speaker to get it right.

Language Matters: The importance of ‘the’ in place names

Laurie Bauer05:00, Dec 07 2020

The Hague, in the Netherlands. It’s no more or less a definite place than Auckland, so why does one have a definite article and the other not?

OPINION: The word the is such an inoffensive little word that it is hard to see why it should cause problems at all. But it does.

There is a big difference between Do you like coffee? and Do you like the coffee?. Some languages, such as Finnish and Russian, have nothing corresponding to the, and speakers of those languages have difficulty learning how to use the in English, but even those of us who have learnt another language which does have a word we translate as the will know that it is not always used in the same way as the English word is.

Here I want to consider the way the is used in place names. All names, including place names, are definite, whether they have a definite article the or not: Auckland and The Hague both refer to equally definite locations. But in most cases, phrases with the are fundamentally descriptions, while those without it are names.

 

Kate Evans

Stewart Island has no “the”. Yet the Isle of Man does.

The Friendly Islands is a description of the islands, and The Isle of Man contains some extra information to tell it apart from other isles, such as The Isle of Wight. Stewart Island, in contrast, is a name. The trouble with this explanation is that definite descriptions merge into names when they are used as labels for places.

New Zealand is unusual in having a number of such labels which we can choose, apparently at random, to use as names or descriptions. Otago is a name (we cannot have The Otago) and The West Coast is a description (we cannot have West Coast without a the). But we can have Waikato or The Waikato, Hawke’s Bay or The Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa or The Wairarapa, and nobody knows why or can point to any distinction.

Waikato, or the Waikato? It would appear to be at the fancy of the speaker.

This variation is unusual. Perhaps the best we can say is that some place names come with a the and some come without it, and you just have to know which is which. But it sounds weird if you start using the wrong one.

Which is why it is so odd to hear some of these expressions routinely misused in our broadcast media. For example, what used to be called The Solomon Islands (and still is on the door of their high commission in Wellington) is often called Solomon Islands. Why wouldn’t it be like The Shetland Islands, The Cook Islands, The Channel Islands or The Canary Islands? There seems to be no linguistic reason for the omission of The in The Solomon Islands, though Britannica says its the was officially dropped in 1975 – perhaps in the lead-up to independence.

There is less reason for the omission of The in The Chatham Islands. Yet RNZ National’s forecasters seem less and less inclined to use it. Even less explicably, they have apparently decided that Central High Country is the name of a particular area of the North Island and not just a description, and use it with no the. Perhaps to make up for this, TVNZ’s Breakfast has started to insert aThe in Cook Strait, which is a name, and so does not need any the at all.

Laurie Bauer: “New Zealand is unusual in having a number of such labels which we can choose, apparently at random, to use as names or descriptions.”

It was once the case that you could tell visitors to New Zealand because they said North Island and South Island instead of The North Island and The South Island. Even this shibboleth is no longer sacrosanct. New Zealanders now use both. The language is changing as people in the public eye omit or insert the at the fancy of the speaker.

 

[Dick Ward]

The adding of ‘the’ or subtracting it, apparently at random by some, reinforces that English, like most languages, I imagine, is  always evolving. In a fairly forced segue, the names of some New Zealand towns stills sounds wrong to my British ears, even after 30-plus years here. For instance, Hastings should be by the sea, and while Herne Bay is on the coast, it is rather more upmarket than the fading Victorian seaside resort in Kent that I used to visit. However, the greatest dissonance to my ears is the pronunciation of Eltham in Taranaki, with the ‘th’ like the ‘th’ in ‘thin’, whereas I went to school near Eltham on the Kent/London border, except that, despite the spelling, I always knew it as Eltam, the ‘h’ having been lost in pronunciation. Perhaps we should change to Maori names throughout.