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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What vowel sound was dominant in 18th century New England pronunciation, despite common protests to the contrary?

2. What ethnicity of people, through the influence of the mercantile class, is referred to by a different name in the United States than in England?

3. What does John S. Farmer describe the Western vernacular as being?

4. According to Benjamin Franklin, what was roughly the population of the colonies in 1751?

5. How many classifications of Americanisms does Gilbert M. Tucker provide in 1921?

Short Essay Questions

1. What characterizes the differences between American and English usage of lower-class idioms?

2. In general, what is the relationship between foreign names for locations and American pronunciations?

3. What is revealed by the attitudes of the English conservatives in Australia towards American spelling?

4. What characterizes the American attitude towards creating new names?

5. Describe H.L. Mencken's attitude towards the American tendencies in the formation of new words.

6. Characterize the intentions and effects of the renaming done by the Geographical Board, according to Mencken.

7. What was the predominant attitude of philologists towards the study of American slang, at the time of Mencken's writing?

8. To what does Mencken ascribe the withdrawal of the National Education Association from the simplified spelling campaign?

9. In what does Mencken evidently delight concerning the speech of American, in Chapter 1.5?

10. What effect did the exploration of new territory have on the language of the American settlers, as described in Chapter 2.3?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Compose an essay analyzing the Americanization of foreign names, as presented in The American Language. How are they Americanized? What characterizes the Americanization of surnames? What characterizes the Americanization of given names? What influences their Americanization? Why are they Americanized? What is lost by their Americanization? What is the result of this tendency to conformity?

Essay Topic 2

Mencken claims that the true American spirit is to be found not in the textbooks or proclamations of grammarians, but in the vulgar speech of the common people. Discuss this claim in a thoughtful analytical essay. What is the American spirit? Does Mencken clearly present what the American spirit is? Is his a defensible claim? How does the vulgar speech of the common person reflect this spirit? Is there some danger of degradation in linguistic form from prevalence of the vulgar speech? How does the vulgar speech reflect upon the American as a human person?

Essay Topic 3

Unlike nouns and adjectives, Mencken devotes considerable inquiry to the nature and alteration of verb forms in The American Language. Write an essay explaining the attention that Mencken pays to verbs. What role do they fulfill in communication? Why do its particular forms change more rapidly than other parts of speech? What does this rapid changing indicate about the relationship between language and circumstance/culture? How do verbs typically change? What is significant about the manner in which they typically change?

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