place names, proper names and definite articles

[gusl]

Pakistan derives its name from an acronym, and other interesting facts: here

In Portuguese, many people put definite articles before someone's name, e.g. I would be referred to as "o Gustavo"... We don't do that in Recife, so I always assumed it was something that Southern Brazilians did that automatically became mainstream (like the affrication of "ti" and "di" into [tshi] and [dzhi], and many more), but thanks to Google, I now believe that this is also widely done in Portugal. It could well be Brazilian influence...

Words in Portuguese can have 2 genders: masculine or feminine. This is true of every lexical category.
... except place names, which can also be neutral. And even then, hardly any countries are neutral. Most neutral things are cities: "em João Pessoa", "em Amsterdã", "em Nova York", but "no Rio" and "no Porto"... Recife is either masculine or neutral: insiders tend to make it neutral (except for old people). Also, Portuguese people tend to make more places neutral relative to Brazilians, e.g. "em França" vs "na França".

I always find it annoying when the city "Porto" gets called "Oporto"... it's "Porto" people, the "o" is not even part of the name.


Also, were Slavs slaves?, where you can read discussions about the origin of country names, in between White Nationalists flaming each others' heritages. Interestingly, many countries have completely different names in Finnish.

Comments

[thepublicguy.livejournal.com]

And in Spanish, at least around Barcelona but not in the Spanish textbooks I read as a teenager.

[thepublicguy.livejournal.com]

i.e, el Jaime, el Pedro, el Juanjo