"the" before country name

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Philip E. Cleary
<philipcleary at rcn.com> wrote:
>
>  In recent years, here in the heart of Red Sox country, I've been hearing
>  "the Dominican." I think that it started with the Dominican players, but
>  it's been picked up by native English speakers.

For more on this, see my 2006 Language Log post "Playing for the
Dominican, skiing in Czech, working in Saudi":

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002893.html


--Ben Zimmer

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