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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 9.10.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What was the Anglo-Saxon form of the modern-day word "my," according to Mencken in Chapter 9.4?
(a) Mi.
(b) Mien.
(c) Min.
(d) Mine.

2. What Anglo-Saxon word does Mencken report the colonists refused to replace with an Old Norse word of similar meaning?
(a) Ill.
(b) Sick.
(c) Vapid.
(d) Hale.

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

4. What sound did Webster object to inserting in words such as "gradual" and "nature," before the "u"?
(a) Dh.
(b) T.
(c) Ch.
(d) Y.

5. Which 1914 English dictionary made many important concessions to American spellings?
(a) The New English Dictionary.
(b) The London Pocket Dictionary.
(c) The Cambridge Fleet Edition.
(d) The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Mencken, the word "none" is a degenerate composition of what two words?

2. What language does Mencken quote Sidney Low as saying is not taught to English youth?

3. Mencken describes the American language as having a "democratic enmity" to all what, in the beginning of Chapter 6.1?

4. Who published a work in 1768 entitled "Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling, with Remarks and Examples Concerning the Same, and an Enquiry into its Uses"?

5. According to Chapter 2.6, what regional pronunciation is erroneously thought by some to have superior authority regarding English pronunciation?

(see the answer key)

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