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Comment by ticktacktock2 | Hacker News Reader

This is unrelated to the topic, but your comment is a good occasion to learn more about what seems to me to be weird (grammatical) article usages by English speakers.

Why did you call it _Les_ Olympiades, and not Olympiades (no article) or _the_ Olympiades (article in English), or _les_ Olympiades (no capitalization of the article) ?

For Porte d'Italie, you did not add any article, i.e. Porte d'Italie and not _La_ Porte d'Italie. Why the difference?

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Honestly? Because I am not French and I just wrote very thoughtlessly. Sorry, no further reasoning behind it.

I see. Still, this is quite common. For instance the English Wikipedia article [0] use the "random French capitalized article" ("Though the proportions are more modest, _Les_ Olympiades are designed similarly to the esplanade of _La_ Défense.", emphasis mine) but not the French Wikipedia 0article [1], which uses "normal" (to me) grammatical articles.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Olympiades

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiades_(quartier_parisien)

The French article repeatedly refers to it as _Les_ Olympiades.

The article is capitalized only when it is the beginning of a sentence, or for the elementary school of the same name. The article behaves "normally" (eg switches to aux Olympiades when needed) while the English article stick to Les Olympiades with a capitalized "Les".

Interestingly, both articles first words are "Les Olympiades", but:

* "Les" is in bold in the English one, as if it was part of the name, while only "Olympiades" is in bold in French

* The French article says "the Olympiades are" while the English one say "the Olympiades is".

Ah now I get what you are saying. Okay so remember this was all subconcious, but I think I added the articles since "Les Olympiades" seems like a whole name. Just "Olympiades" makes less sense since that could have different meanings, like people perhaps. In that sense, I considered "Les" as part of the name. Therefore, it is capitalized.

Porte d'Italy on the other hand is clear, there's only one interpretation, and therefore the article is not part of the name.

I am not saying this is right, just my brain doing brain things. I apologize if correctness is important for you, I will try to be more precise going foward.

Just like you would say 'les miserables' or 'le big mac'

It's pretty typical to capitalize articles in English if those articles are part of a proper noun (esp. at the beginning of the term). So it seems likely that the article is seen as part of the name of the place. I'd guess there's a similar phenomenon with plurality in proper nouns.

I think this comes down to the fact that English speakers don't consider their own articles very much because they're always the same. We don't have to put any effort into picking one, so selection is unconscious and automatic.

I recall Ukrainians objecting to the English-speaking world's fixation on calling their country "the Ukraine" instead of just "Ukraine." The propensity to just append articles to nouns to facilitate flow is hard to overcome.

>I think this comes down to the fact that English speakers don't consider their own articles very much because they're always the same.

It's a little bit like how native English speakers tend to regard accent marks as largely optional decoration.

Not so weird, its use is governed by convention. Country names derived from geographical feature take a definite article.

Country Names and 'The': The Ukraine or Ukraine https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/country-...

The definite article makes sense in this case, since it's a specific place and not a category, "les" because that's how you'd probably see it written if mentioned out of context elsewhere[0], and capitalized (against French convention) because proper names are typically capitalized in English, including articles.

And also because people who speak about Les Olympiades in English call it Les Olympiades, in a deliberate effort to distinguish it from the Métro station.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italie_13#Les_Olympiades

This does not explain why "Les" is considered a part of the name, i.e. English speakers could call it "_the_ Olympiades", to distinguish it from the Métro station.

I'd say the same reason the Spanish Wikipedia article for Alhambra uses La in front of Alhambra even though Al is the article in Arabic.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra

Native speakers usualllly ignore the articles from another language unless there was a cultural reason not to. It also just sounds better to my native ear.

There isn't a rule about that sort of thing, but a convention you get used to over time.

Adding the Les gives Olympiades more context. The extra word provides clues that this is a straight foreign word that should be treated differently. Port d'Italie is already two words, so extra context isn't necessarily needed.

Like many things in English, it's up to the speaker/writer, and the context.

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