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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In what century did England replace the "i-sound" with the "oi-sound" in words such as "boy"?
(a) The eighteenth.
(b) The sixteenth.
(c) The nineteenth.
(d) The seventeenth.

2. Which two letters did the American ethnologist McGee insist were his first name and should not be followed by periods?
(a) AD.
(b) WJ.
(c) TJ.
(d) EL.

3. Which of the following nations does Mencken not list as having more interesting war slang than the Americans during the Great War?
(a) England.
(b) Russia.
(c) France.
(d) Germany.

4. In what century did Americans begin to rebel against the capitalization trends dominant in England?
(a) The nineteenth.
(b) The twentieth.
(c) The eighteenth.
(d) The seventeenth.

5. Who does Mencken state are the true makers of grammar in Chapter 9.1?
(a) The authors of fiction.
(b) The masses.
(c) The grammarians.
(d) The learned.

Short Answer Questions

1. Which of the following is one of the three great causes of change in language according to Sayce, as reported in Chapter 9.3?

2. From which of the following have the English changed their spelling?

3. Which organization produced a prospectus in 1913 that warned against extreme English conservatism in the spelling of foreign loan-words?

4. Which of the following is not one of the minor differences Mencken lists in Chapter 8.7?

5. For which voiceless consonant is the voiced "d" substituting with growing regularity, according to Mearns?

(see the answer keys)

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