Most English-language newspapers (The New York Times, The Guardian, The Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal).All art galleries (The Tate, The Louvre, The Smithsonian American Art Museum), all museums with the word museum in the name (The Museum of Natural History, The British Museum).All rivers (The Amazon, The Nile, The Mississippi, The Seine, The Yangtze), canals (The Panama Canal, The Suez Canal) and deltas (The Nile Delta, The Orinoco Delta, The Colorado River Delta).All seas (The Red Sea, The Bering Sea, The Caribbean Sea), and straits (The Strait of Magellan, the Bering Strait, The Bosphorus).All oceans (The Atlantic Ocean, The Pacific Ocean).Names of countries containing specifications like kingdom, republic etc are used with the: The Lebanon (usually used without the article).The Ukraine (article dropped since 1991).The Sudan (can also be used without an article).The Yemen (can also be used without an article).There are a few exceptions, most of which are pluralised: See also Appendix:English proper nouns for more information.Īs a general rule, country names are not preceded by the. The word the precedes proper nouns in a number of cases, although most proper nouns use no article. (Compare A street in Paris.) The men and women watched the man give the birdseed to the bird. (Compare I’m reading a book.) The street in front of your house. Definite grammatical article that implies necessarily that an entity it hints at is presupposed something already mentioned, or completely specified later in that same sentence, or assumed already completely specified.Originally neutral nominative, in Middle English it superseded all previous Old English nominative forms ( sē m, sēo f, þæt n, þā pl) sē is from Proto-West Germanic *siz, from Proto-Germanic *sa, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *só.Ĭognate with Saterland Frisian die ( “ the ” ), West Frisian de ( “ the ” ), Dutch de ( “ the ” ), German Low German de ( “ the ” ), German der ( “ the ” ), Danish de ( “ the ” ), Swedish de ( “ the ” ), Icelandic sá ( “ that ” ) within Germanic and with Sanskrit sá ( “ the, that ” ), Ancient Greek ὁ ( ho, “ the ” ), Tocharian B se ( “ this ” ) among other Indo-European languages. The actual morpheme /jiː/ in Middle English represents ȝe-, a variant spelling of the prefix y- attached to verbs and used to denote a verbal past participle.įrom Middle English þe, from Old English þē m ( “ the, that ”, demonstrative pronoun ), a late variant of sē, the s- (which occurred in the masculine and feminine nominative singular only) having been replaced by the þ- from the oblique stem. It is not actually a separate pronunciation in Middle English.

The typographical pronunciation /jiː/ ( ' Ye Old.') is a deliberately archaic retronym from ye, which is a variant spelling of þe, from Old English þē pronounced thē, /θeː/, /ðeː/ (using y in place of the thorn ( þ).

The &quot;volunteer&quot; by D.H. Jonathan

The "volunteer" by D.H. Jonathan