Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 14:23:21 -0800

From: "Alan S. Kaye" AKAYE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CCVAX.FULLERTON.EDU

Subject: Re: The great California freeway isogloss revisited



I was intrihued by Larry Horn's observation re the def. article and

dialectology. As a southern Californian, I can say (and do) 'I took

the 91', etc., but with reference to Hwy 80, say, it sounds iffy to

say

'I took the 80', or 'I took the 40'.

Larry, do you mean to say a northern Calif. would say:

'I took 91' for my sentence above? Would it be ungrammatical or just

awkward?

Is any of this written up anywhere (books or articles). The reason I am

most interested in this is that the loss of the article is a colloquial

Arabic feature as opposed to the classical language. 'Alexandria'

in coll. Arabic is 'iskindiriyya; in Classical Arabic it has an al-

before it 'the' = al'iskandariyya. Does anyone out there have any

parallels as I am writing this up in an article?

Alan Kaye

Linguistics

CSU, Fullerton (CA 92634)