Don Antonio Magino

This can’t be the whole truth, though. What ivanafterall is describing is true for essentially the whole western world. Media (or at least high-brow media) feel they need to be respectable, and to be respectable you have to be perfectly neutral. Not just in America did established media feel the need trivialise Musk’s obvious Hitler salute, this happened all over. I follow Dutch and German media, and haven’t seen a mainline newspaper call it what it was.

Judging from this very polemic article by linguistic anthropologist Kathryn E. Graber, the argument is that a linguistic distinction that exists in Russian (and Ukrainian) is mirrorred in other languages using the definite article. ‘Na Ukraine’ on the one hand literally means ‘on Ukraine’, ‘v Ukraine’ on the other ‘in Ukraine’. Graber goes on to say that ‘In Russian, a person is “na” an unbounded territory, such as a hill, but “v” a bounded territory that is defined politically or institutionally, such as a nation-state.’ She would then probably also argue that the same, in English, goes for names like ‘the Congo’, being named after a river. The claim that this is a Soviet-era practice (if what she means by that is that it arose during the Soviet Union), is simply not true, though. In Google Books you can find plenty of titles with ‘the Ukraine’ from before 1900. The earliest mention I found in English (though I didn’t look very well) was from 1672.

It anyway strikes me as very performative. You can well argue that language influences the way we view the world (though, I think the way we view the world influences the language we use much more). Even so, there are obviously much bigger (concrete) threats to Ukrainian sovereignty than (to Ukrainians) foreigners using a definite article or not. Thus, it becomes less a matter of protecting sovereignty, and more a matter of simple respect to Ukrainian sensibilities. Ukrainians may take offence at you using the definite article, and you may want to prevent that by not saying ‘the Ukraine’.

I’m not sure what you mean here. As far as spelling goes, Dutch is far more consistent than English.

You’re mentioning some none-standard Dutch which is often perceived as incorrect (and it is indeed according to the rules of the standard language norm). Yet, if you were correct in your claim that ‘groter als jij’ was ‘never proper Dutch and sound[s] wrong to every native Dutch speaker’, no native Dutch speaker would ever use ‘groter als jij’. Native Dutch speakers do this often, though, and have been doing it at least since the seventeenth century (eg. this quote from 1670: ‘Zy [de vrucht ”Peci”] is niet veel groter als een kastanie …, vol sap en aengenaem van smaek: herder dan een gemeine appel, en een weinig zuurachtig,’ - ‘It [the fruit “Peci”] is not much bigger than a chestnut …, full of juice and pleasantly tasting: harder than a common apple, and a bit sourish,’).

Sorry to have gone so off-topic here, though.

EDIT: Woops, got confused myself

The plural -s in Dutch only gets an apostrophe if the stem word ends on an open vowel. So it’s cavia-cavia’s on the one hand, but kikker-kikkers on the other (and la[de]-lades). So even in Dutch this’d be incorrect ;)