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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Do you call the Netherlands the Netherlands or “Netherlands”?

Do you call a country “neutral” after its legislature specifically amended the national constitution for it to declare that national membership in NATO in the future is inexorable?

My favorite name for it is the French one; literally, "low country".

it's also worth noting that the language spoken there calls itself 'Nederlands'. It's kind of like how the Franks speak Frankish, and very much how the Deutsch speak Deutsch.

I call it ‘the Netherland’ a literal translation of my grandfather’s ‘de Nederland’, for what it’s worth- most people call it holland.

But I imagine most Dutch don't call their country 'Holland' as it's not completely synonymous with the Netherlands in terms of geography and history, do they?

No, most Americans call it holland, I see no point in getting upset with them.

The formal self-chosen English name of the sovereign state commonly known as "The Netherlands" is "Kingdom of the Netherlands" - in other words "the" is part of the name. TIL that the Dutch authorities use "Netherlands" without "the" to refer specifically to the core part of the Kingdom excluding partially self-governing overseas territories (which nevertheless includes the non-self-governing overseas territories, such that "Dutch Mainland" refers to yet another thing that is not "Netherlands" or "Kingdom of the Netherlands", also commonly known as "the Netherlands" by foreigners). But most foreigners talking about the Netherlands are not trying to make that kind of fine-grained distinction. I wouldn't complain about a foreigner not knowing the legal difference between "Great Britain" and "Britain" or "The British Isles" and "The British Islands".

On the other hand, calling the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland "England", calling the Kingdom of the Netherlands "Holland", or calling Ukraine "The Ukraine" is either culpably ignorant or malicious.

The equally malicious, ignorant, insensitive etc. naming would be 'Little Russia', 'Greater Novorossiya' or something similar.

Also, I'm sure that the reason foreigners use the name 'the Netherlands' is not that it's the shortening of the official name of the state by dropping the 'KIngdom' part, but to differentiate it from 'netherlands' as a geographic category.

Eh, let's not go that far. We called the Netherlands Holland back in my day in the UK , so I sometimes use it even nowadays, same with the Ukraine. The Netherlands themselves only officially dropped support for using Holland in 2019.

There is no way that qualifies as being culpably ignorant. Likewise I have lost track of the number of people in the US who equate British with England (and indeed Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland). As Wikipedia itself says:

"Holland" is informally used in English and other languages, including sometimes the Dutch language itself, to mean the whole of the modern country of the Netherlands.[5] This example of pars pro toto or synecdoche is similar to the tendency to refer to the United Kingdom as "England",[9][10] and developed due to Holland's becoming the dominant province and thus having the majority of political and economic interactions with other countries.[11]

If the Dutch themselves sometimes still use Holland and only officially stopped using it with in the last 5 years, then I struggle to imagine that anyone outside of the country can be called culpably ignorant or malicious, for not keeping updated on that.

It's technically incorrect but it is entirely understandable in all of your examples. Especially for anyone over 30. And I am a Northern Irish Brit who quite often gets called either English or Irish depending. For most people outside of the UK, there just isn't any need to learn that that is technically incorrect. It has no impact on their lives at all.

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