[email protected] wrote: > > It's fairly straightforward really. The only complication is the merging of > England and Wales into a single entity back in the dim and distant. When > Scotland was annexed under the English crown, the Union became 'Great > Britain'. >
I think actually the Scottish union happened in two stages, first the Scottish king inherited the English crown, then about a century later there was an Act of Union which created the political entity of Great Britain - but that's not really relevant here. When (Northern) Ireland became part of the Union, it became the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. > So if you want to talk about individual countries/provinces/principalities, > you call them by their own name. > If you want to talk about the mainland, it's Great Britain. > If you want to include Northern Ireland, it's the United Kingdom. > If you want to include the Irish Republic, then it's the British Isles. I'm well aware of all of that. It was the use of the term 'country', without specifying what it referred to, that I was commenting on. Martin L
