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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 is the English meaning of the phrase "to carry on"?

2. Where was the broad "a" principally established prior to the Civil War?

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

4. Mencken claims that Noah Webster contains less of the scientific inquirer and more of what?

5. According to Mencken, what did the first generations born in the New World value as a virtue over enterprise and resourcefulness?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why does Mencken find the double negative an appreciable linguistic deviation?

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

3. How does a word move from legitimate vocabulary to slang vocabulary, according to Mencken?

4. What general problem of language does Mencken describe in Chapter 1.1?

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

6. As explained in Chapter 6.4, why are Americans more conceding to foreign loan-words than the English are?

7. What typically causes the difficulties of the American when hearing the Englishman or vice versa, as explained in Chapter 7.1?

8. What does Mencken intimate by the assertion that the "inner spirit of English" has inclined steadily towards saying "I have go" for a thousand years?

9. How does the severity and conventional loyalty of grammarians influence those they attempt to educate?

10. What is the most common incorrect usage of the adjective in vulgar American?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay analyzing the nature of the relationship between the "melting pot" of American immigrant assimilation and the nomenclature that permeates the country. What are the evident influences of foreign languages on American names? How are these names Americanized? What is the general tendency of American-speakers in the employment and application of names to places and people? To what degree are the various names Americanized? What is the cause of Americanization of names? What is its result and what does it indicate about the American spirit?

Essay Topic 2

A significant contributor to the present state of the American language is the influx of foreign words, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Compose an essay analyzing the impact and influences of these various foreign words. What particular contributions have they made to the language? How do they reflect the overall composition of the American populace? How have these words themselves changed? How have they changed the language overall? How do all of these changes indicate the tendencies of the American English dialect?

Essay Topic 3

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?

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