Re: Articles with propper names (was RE: Same name (was ...))

Eric Christopherson <raccoon@...> wrote:

>My professor said that at least in the Spanish spoken in the southwestern
>US, putting a definite article before a personal name is often taken as
>derogatory. Is this true of other dialects?

As I said, it's often uneducated (though common within
families, even for people of a very high social status).
It can become rather rude with the addition of the
demonstrative ("la Juana ésa, el Pedro ése") -- this
is parallel to the use of common nouns. It makes the
reference indirect, which is the cause of the rude
connotation (like calling a work of art "that thing").


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  "... When all men on earth think, day and night, about the
   Zahir, which one will be a dream and which one a reality?"
                              Jorge Luis Borges, _The Zahir_