The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 1

1. The English language existed already when Julius Caesar landed in Britain.

2. Between 750 million and 1 billion people speak English, according to the authors.

3. English is a foreign language in India, Kenya, Nigeria and Singapore.

4. The Education act of 1870 was important in the establishment of the King’s English and the Received Pronunciation.

5. The terms U and Non-U refer to upper-class and non-upper-class varieties respectively.

6. American broadcasting developed an all-American accent known as ‘Network Standard’.

7. President John Kennedy was admired as a speaker of ‘Network Standard’.

8. R.K. Narayan and Chinua Achebe use Nigerian and Indian English, respectively.

9. Successive French governments have welcomed the spread of English words in French.

10.George Bernard Shaw was the most famous champion of simplified spelling.

The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 2

1. Sir William Jones was a British judge stationed in India.

2. Jakob Grimm established that German Vater and English father have the same root as Latin pater.

3. Frisian is the language that is most closely related to English.

4. The word Welsh is of Celtic origin and meant foreigner.

5. The capital of Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, was London.

6. Placenames ending in –by like Grimsby and -wick like Chiswick were of Anglo-Saxon rather than Danish origin.

7. When King John lost his possessions in France, the position of the French language in England was strengthened.

8. In Middle English there were five speech areas: Northern, West and East Midlands, Southern and Kentish.

9. Henry VIII was the first king to use English for official correspondence.

10. Modern English spelling owes much to William Caxton.

The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 3

1. During the Renaissance relatively few Latin and Greek words entered the English language.

2. In Elizabethan English there was a conflict between authors who used ‘inkhorn terms’ and those who preferred ‘plainness’.

3. William Shakespeare must have used the standard pronunciation of English.

4. telleth, speaketh and tells, speaks. Shakespeare could use both the older, Southern forms and the newer, Northern forms.

5. James I of England spoke Broad Scots .

6. The Authorized Version of the Bible was published in 1611..

7. Many Puritans came from East Anglia.

8. Algonquin words were adopted by speakers of American English.

9. fall for autumn, I guess, mad for angry, sick for ill; these are some American innovations.

10. American English has borrowed more words from Spanish than from any other language.

The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 4

1. The spread of Southern English in Scotland in the 17^th and 18^th century was the result of a deliberate policy of the crown.

2. An academy for the improvement of the English language was established in the 17^th century.

3. Jonathan Swift was in favour of shortening words such as reputation to rep and mobile to mob.

4. Dr Johnson ’s dictionary was the first dictionary of the English language.

5. When Johnson and Boswell toured the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, they found that the majority of people there spoke Scots.

6. Lowland Scots was a northern variant of the English of Northumbria.

7. The Bible was first translated into Scots in the 20^th century.

8. Robert Burns was born in Ayrshire in the Scottish Highlands.

9. Sir Walter Scott wrote his novels in standard English.

10. Many Scots Irish people emigrated to North America in the 17^th century.

The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 5

1. Heaney, Beckett, Joyce, Wilde and Swift all contributed to Ireland’s literary achievement.

2. Henry VIII was the first English monarch to visit Ireland.

3. In Ireland the pronunciation of the letter <h> is used to determine if a person is a Catholic or a Protestant.

4. Irish people are reluctant to say “yes” and “no”. .

5. Malapropisms are statements by the Irish politician Malaprop.

6. Many Irish people rhyme words like “obey” and “tea” and “way” and “sea”.

7. The Act of Union of 1803 made Ireland part of the United Kingdom.

8. The novelist J.M. Synge was much influenced by Irish English.

9. The Playboy of the Western World was an Irish magazine for men.

10. The speech of Liverpool and Merseyside was strongly influenced by Irish immigrants.

The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 6

1. The words voodoo, tote, banjo, juke and banana are of African origin.

2. The Middle Passage was the journey from America to Bristol.

3. The creoles of Barbados and Jamaica are pidgins.

4. Charleston, South Carolina, used to be the slave capital of the US.

5. To sell someone down the river means to do that person a favour.

6. Joe Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus stories, was of African origin.

7. George Gershwin ’s opera Porgy and Bess contains many Black English words.

8. The original meaning of jazz was to speed up.

9. The word rap as in take the rap meant talk.

10. The influence of Black English on American English has been substantial.

The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 7

1. The words wigwam, pretzel, spook, depot and canyon are of Indian, German, Dutch, French and Spanish origin respectively.

2. Thomas Jefferson proposed a reform of English spelling.

3. Noah Webster was the fifth American president.

4. Noah Webster predicted that the American language would become as different from the English of England as Dutch from German.

5. Canadian English descended from the speech of the Loyalists who settled in Ontario .

6. The term bootleg was coined by American pioneers.

7. The “Gettysburg Address ” was written by Mark Twain.

8. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe ”. This is a line from a poem by Walt Whitman.

9. The phrases liberty cabbage and hot dog were coined during the First World War to replace sauerkraut and frankfurter.

10. According to H.L.Mencken, British English and American English were two separate languages on divergent paths.

The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 8

1. The first British convicts landed in Botany Bay in 1688 .

2. H-dropping was already a characteristic of Cockney in the 16^th century.

3. John Keats was known as the “Cockney poet”.

4. The word yob is an example of rhyming slang.

5. Many Cockney words were borrowed from Yiddish.

6. The Australian Aborigines spoke the Aboriginal language.

7. There is considerable regional variation in Australian English.

8. Australian men tend to speak Broad and General Australian, whereas Australian women tend to speak General and Cultivated Australian.

9. In New Zealand English there are several borrowings from Maori.

10. The majority of South Africans are native speakers of South African English.

The Story of English

10 questions on chapter 9

1. Jamaican English is sometimes referred to as “patois”.

2. Some scholars in the University of the West Indies would like Jamaican creole to be generally accepted in Jamaica.

3. Barbadian English is the variety of Caribbean English with the most speakers.

4. In Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, Ki Swahili tends to be the lingua franca.

5. Krio was the language of the liberated slaves in Monrovia , Liberia.

6. Indian English was strongly influenced by French and Dutch.

7. Indian English and British and American English are always mutually intelligible.

8. After India’s independence Urdu became the first national language.

9. In the Philippines American English used to be preferred to British English.

10. The authors wonder if Spanish and Mandarin might not challenge the hegemony of American English.

5 questions on the Early Middle Ages

1. Queen Boadicea was an outstanding Anglo-Saxon queen.

2. Julius Caesar ordered a wall to be built from the River Tyne to Solway Firth to protect northern England from barbarian raids.

3. Alfred the Great failed to halt the Danish advance, and the Danes conquered the whole of England.

4. The part of England ruled by the Danes was called the Danelaw.

5. The Ecclesiastical History of the English‘ was an epic poem written in Old English.

5 questions on the Late Middle Ages

1. The `Domesday Book‘ was an important work of fiction in Norman England.

2. Thomas Becket was Archbishop of York.

3. Henry II was famous as a law-giver.

4. The Statute of Labourers was an important piece of legislation, which improved the condition of the peasants.

5. At Runnymede John Lackland was forced by the barons to call the first Model Parliament (origin of the House of Commons).