The is the point of this post

It wasn't until I came to the US for graduate school did I know that I was not using "the" when I had to, and was overusing it when I didn't need to.  It ain't easy to learn English as a second language!

It goes back to the Tamil language that was, as we used to say in the old country, my mother tongue.

Even with that usage--"mother tongue"--I recall this hilarious incident from my elementary school days.  Our math teacher--the maths master, as we said then--was a quirky, funny, old man.  Well, he seemed old to us when we were kids and, for all I know, perhaps he was the age I am now!  "PK Master" was how we referred to him.

PK Master would suddenly ask a student something interesting while seemingly looking at another.  And, at the same time tap yet another on the head with a long ruler that he always seemed to have in his hand.  We knew that we always had to be on the alert in his class.  Every once in a while, he would intentionally make a mistake in the problem he would have worked out on the blackboard in order to check whether we were merely copying things down or if we were thinking for ourselves.

One of our old classroom buildings

Where was I?  Yes, the mother tongue. So, one rainy day PK Master was walking around while we were trying to solve the problems he had assigned when he asked one of the girls, Madhulika, what her mother tongue was.

I bet she was petrified as much as any of us were whenever PK Master asked us anything; she blurted out, "it is pink."

It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you would have blurted out even worse things, I tell ya!

Anyway, English is a funny language to learn, with its rules that make no sense.  One of the rules that apparently I hadn't mastered was about "the."  When to use it and how to use it.

For instance, if one were to think in Tamil a statement "நான் லைப்ரரிக்கு போறேன் " and then translate that into English, the translation would be "I am going to library."  Note that the translation does not include "the."

We have to systematically learn to add "the" and say in English "I am going to the library."  Once we pick up such bad habits, well, it takes a lot of effort to unlearn the incorrect ways and learn the correct ones.  I wonder why the English teachers back in my school never pointed this out to me; can't blame them when there were forty kids in the class, eh!

As I started re-learning the English language as a graduate student, I spotted this craziness in all kinds of casual contexts too, not merely in grad school work.  One of the instances in which the "the" issue came up was about the Philippines.

My apartment-mate's father was working in the Philippines at that time--with the Asian Development Bank.  He was also a Tamil.  I noticed that the country was "the Philippines" when a bunch of us Tamil folks spoke in English. But, it was "Philippines" if we spoke in Tamil--there was no "the" there.

So, what is "the" deal with the Philippines?  Here is Wikipedia to "the" rescue:

The official name of the Philippines has changed several times in the course of its history. During the Philippine Revolution, the Malolos Congress proclaimed the establishment of the República Filipina or the Philippine Republic. From the period of the Spanish–American War (1898) and the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) until the Commonwealth period (1935–1946), American colonial authorities referred to the country as the Philippine Islands, a translation of the Spanish name.^[25] Since the end of World War II, the official name of the country has been the Republic of the Philippines. Philippines has steadily gained currency as the common name since being the name used in Article VI of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, with or without the definite article.^[35]

It is not because of the bizarre grammar rules in English, but all because of Spanish?  Oh the crap! ;)