(The) United States (of whatever)

Re a post by Amando de Miguel in his interesting, if fairly Pleistocene, language column for Libertad Digital, I’ve compiled a little table of hits over time from Mark Davies’ corpus for several Spanish versions of the Great Satan (no hits in there for el Gran Satanás unfortunately). I’ve omitted

• USA = América because I’m interested in whether the article los is plonked in front and whether that tells us anything about changing attitudes to the USA.
• USA = estados/EEUU/EE.UU because the latter two don’t appear in the corpus before 1900, and I believe the former also to be a C20th innovations (don’t let me stop you combing through the results, tho).

Stats are case- and diacritic-insensitive (América is sometimes written without the acute, and Estados and Unidos are sometimes estados and unidos). Here are they:

I’m not sure why the definite article gets so thoroughly dropped in relative terms in the 20th century. The most plausible explanation I can imagine is that it has something to do with patriotic clamour against presumed American arrogance (”What do they mean, they’re THE United States?! What about Estados Unidos de México?!”) which resulted from the psychologically devastating defeat suffered by Spain in 1898 in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and which I believe to be an important underlying cause of much contemporary left- and right-wing anti-Americanism in the Spanish state, of which more another time.

(I haven’t noticed any instances in the corpus of the Estados Unidos de Hólanda. That’s interesting, because post-independence American writing frequently uses the phrase; The Nation tells us that:

)

Trevor @ 17 October 2005 11:34 PM

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