PG TRB - ENGLISH

 

Spelling Reform

Q&Answers are copyrighted to springline, Under the Copyright Act


©trb.springline.in

1. A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples are the German orthography reform of 1996 and the on-off Portuguese spelling reform of _______

A:) 1990

B:) 1991

C:) 1992

D:) 1993

springline- Correct option: A:) 1990


©trb.springline.in

2. Spelling reform may also be associated with wider discussion about the official script, as well as language planning and language reform. Orthographic reform may be reverted. In Romanian, the letter â was eliminated in 1953 but reintroduced in _______

A:) 1992

B:) 1993

C:) 1994

D:) 1995

springline- Correct option: B:) 1993


©trb.springline.in

3. In languages written with alphabetic or syllabary scripts, one might expect that there would be a close match of the script or spelling with the spoken sound. Redundancy of letters is often an issue in spelling reform, which prompts the ‘Economic Argument’—significant cost savings in the production materials over time—as promulgated by ____

A:) James Joyce

B:) Edgar Allen Poe

C:) George Bernard Shaw

D:) Walpole

springline- Correct option: C:) George Bernard Shaw


©trb.springline.in

4. Spelling reforms have been proposed for various languages over the years; these have ranged from modest attempts to eliminate particular irregularities (such as SR1 or Initial Teaching Alphabet) through more far-reaching reforms (such as Cut Spelling) to attempts to introduce a full phonemic orthography, like the ____

A:) Turkish alphabet

B:) Deva Greek alphabet

C:) Grecian alphabet

D:) Shavian alphabet

springline- Correct option: D:) Shavian alphabet


©trb.springline.in

5. People who use non-standard spelling often suffer from adverse opinions, as a person's mastery of standard spelling is often equated to his or her level of formal education or intelligence. Spelling is easier in languages with more or less consistent spelling systems such as Finnish, Serbian, Italian and ____?

A:) Spanish

B:) Latin

C:) Greek

D:) Dutch

springline- Correct option: A:) Spanish


©trb.springline.in

6. Which is an extreme example of a defective orthography in which spelling cannot be systematically derived from pronunciation, but it also has the more unusual problem that pronunciation cannot be systematically derived from spelling?

A:) English

B:) Spanish

C:) Italian

D:) Latin

springline- Correct option: A:) English


©trb.springline.in

7. English spelling contains many irregularities for various reasons. English has generally preserved the original spelling when borrowing words; and even more importantly, English began to be widely written and printed during the _____

A:) Old English Period

B:) Middle English period

C:) Modern period

D:) Civil war period

springline- Correct option: B:) Middle English period


©trb.springline.in

8. The later development of modern English included a Great Vowel Shift and many other changes in phonology, yet the older spellings, which are no longer phonetic, have been kept. On the other hand, many words were refashioned to reflect their Latin or Greek etymology. For example, for ‘debt’ early Middle English wrote det/dette, with the b being standardized in spelling in the ______

A:) 15th century

B:) 16th century

C:) 17th century

D:) 18th century

springline- Correct option: B:) 16th century


©trb.springline.in

9. Critics have claimed that a consistent phonemically based system would be impractical: for example, phoneme distribution differs between British English and American English; furthermore, while English Received Pronunciation features about ______

A:) 10 vowels

B:) 20 vowels

C:) 25 vowels

D:) 30 vowels

springline- Correct option: C:) 25 vowels


©trb.springline.in

10. A number of proposals have been made to reform English spelling. Some were proposed by Whom, early in the 19th century and he was in part concerned to distinguish American from British usage. Some of his suggestions resulted in the differences between American and British spelling?

A:) William Jones

B:) George Bernard Shaw

C:) Dr. Johnson

D:) Noah Webster

springline- Correct option: D:) Noah Webster


©trb.springline.in

11. In the 1950s, the Language Reform Committee of the People's Republic of China devised the Hanyu Pinyin orthography and promulgated it as the official romanization system of mainland China. Since pinyin became the international standard for Chinese romanization in_______

A:) 1981

B:) 1982

C:) 1983

D:) 1984

springline- Correct option: B:) 1982


©trb.springline.in

12. The Republic of China ( Taiwan ) continued to use Wade-Giles romanization until the turn of the 21st century, when the Tongyong Pinyin romanization was introduced. Tongyong Pinyin has been sporadically adopted throughout the island, and criticized for inconsistency. Hanyu Pinyin, the same system used in the mainland, was formally adopted in ________

A:) 2007

B:) 2008

C:) 2009

D:) 2010

springline- Correct option: C:) 2009


©trb.springline.in

13. Dutch has undergone a series of major spelling reforms beginning in 1804 - with varying levels of official backing and popular acceptance across Dutch-speaking areas. The Dutch Language Union, founded in 1980 by the Netherlands and Belgium, is now the source of official reforms. In 1995 it issued the ______

A:) Green Booklet

B:) Red Booklet

C:) Blue Booklet

D:) Orange Booklet

springline- Correct option: A:) Green Booklet


©trb.springline.in

14. The new recommended orthography received official support in France, Belgium, and Quebec in 2004. The 2009 version of Le Petit Robert incorporates most of the changes. There are 6000 words, including words which were not part of the 1990 reform, for example, charrette or charette, based on_______

A:) charlet

B:) chocolate

C:) chariot

D:) chachos

springline- Correct option: C:) chariot


©trb.springline.in

15. German spelling was officially unified in 1901 and certain older spelling patterns were updated: for instance some occurrences of ‘th’ were changed to ‘t’. In 1944 a spelling reform was due to be introduced, but it ultimately came to nothing because of _______

A:) World War I

B:) World War II

C:) Civil War

D:) Spanish War

springline- Correct option: B:) World War II


©trb.springline.in

16. The classical, medieval, and early modern polytonic orthography inherited archaisms from Ancient Greek, which have been eliminated or simplified in the modern monotonic orthography. Indonesian underwent spelling reforms in 1947 and 1972, after which its spelling was more consistent with the form of the language spoken in Malaysia. The old spelling of ‘OE’ changed as a new spelling of_____?

A:) u

B:) v

C:) i

D:) g

springline- Correct option: A:) u


©trb.springline.in

17. Malay underwent spelling reforms in 1972, after which its spelling was more consistent with the form of the language spoken in Indonesia. These changes were a part of an officially mandated spelling reform in 1972. Some of the old spellings, which were more closely derived from the________?

A:) Spanish language

B:) English language

C:) French language

D:) Italian language

springline- Correct option: B:) English language


©trb.springline.in

18. The medieval spelling of Portuguese was mostly phonemic, but, from the Renaissance on, many authors who admired classical culture began to use an etymological orthography. In the early 20th century, however, spelling reforms in Portugal and Brazil reverted the orthography to phonemic principles. Later reforms Brazil, 1943 and______?

A:) 1970

B:) 1971

C:) 1972

D:) 1973

springline- Correct option: C:) 1972


©trb.springline.in

19. The most recent major reform of Russian spelling was carried out shortly after the Russian Revolution. The Russian orthography was simplified by eliminating four obsolete letters (ѣ, і, ѵ, and ѳ) and the archaic usage of the letter ъ (called yer, or hard sign) at the ends of words, which had originally represented a vowel with a sound similar to schwa, but had become silent by the ____?

A:) Civil period

B:) Saxon ages

C:) Middle Ages

D:) Modern ages

springline- Correct option: C:) Middle Ages


©trb.springline.in

20. Several Cyrillic alphabets with 28 to 44 letters were used in the beginning and middle of the 19th century during the effort to codify Modern Bulgarian until an alphabet with 32 letters, proposed by Marin Drinov, gained prominence in the ____?

A:) 1840s

B:) 1850s

C:) 1860s

D:) 1870s

springline- Correct option: D:) 1870s


©trb.springline.in

21. Within the South Slavic languages, which form a dialect continuum, the Serbo-Croatian language itself consists of four literary standards: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Before then, two distinct writing traditions had evolved. Which dialects had been written using the Latin alphabet, while eastern (Serbian) had been using an archaic form of the Cyrillic script?

A:) East Midland dialects

B:) Western dialects

C:) London dialects

D:) Northern dialects

springline- Correct option: B:) Western dialects


©trb.springline.in

22. In a 1948 reform, the Danish language abandoned the capitalization of common nouns (originally a German-inspired rule) to align with the other Scandinavian languages. In 1980, W was recognized as a distinct letter. Before that, it was considered a variation of ______?

A:) u

B:) v

C:) w

D:) y

springline- Correct option: B:) v


©trb.springline.in

23. The Hebrew language has two systems of spelling – with and without vowel marks, called Niqqud. The Academy of the Hebrew Language publishes rules for both vocalized and unvocalized spelling. The latest major revision to the rules of unvocalized spelling were published in___?

A:) 1994

B:) 1995

C:) 1996

D:) 1997

springline- Correct option: C:) 1996


©trb.springline.in

24. Such etymologies often have the feel of urban legends, and can be more colorful and fanciful than the typical etymologies found in dictionaries, often involving stories of unusual practices in particular subcultures, Oxford students from non-noble families being supposedly forced to write sine nobilitate by their name, soon abbreviated to s.nob., hence the word _____ ?

A:) snob

B:) snot

C:) snap

D:) stop

springline- Correct option: A:) snob


©trb.springline.in

25. A false etymology (fake etymology, popular etymology, etymythology, pseudo-etymology, or par(A:)etymology) is a popular but false belief about the origin or derivation of a specific word. It is sometimes called a _____

A:) mock etymology

B:) folk etymology

C:) fallacy etymology

D:) lock etymology

springline- Correct option: B:) folk etymology


©trb.springline.in

26. Other false etymologies are the result of specious and untrustworthy claims made by individuals, such as the unfounded claims made by Daniel Cassidy that hundreds of common English words such as baloney, grumble, and bunkum derive from _____

A:) Italian language

B:) Germanion language

C:) Spanish language

D:) Irish language

springline- Correct option: D:) Irish language


©trb.springline.in

27. In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme by removing actual or supposed affixes. The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in ___

A:) 1887

B:) 1888

C:) 1889

D:) 1890

springline- Correct option: C:) 1889


©trb.springline.in

28. Back-formation may be similar to the reanalyses or folk etymologies when it rests on an erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets was not originally a plural; it is a loanword from Anglo-Norman asetz in modern French______

A:) asses

B:) assez

C:) accent

D:) assixes

springline- Correct option: B:) assez


©trb.springline.in

29. Back-formation is different from clipping – back-formation may change the word's class or meaning. Words can sometimes acquire new lexical categories without any derivational change in form (for example, ship [in the nautical sense] was first a noun and later was used as a verB:). That process is called____

A:) derivation

B:) formation

C:) influene

D:) conversion

springline- Correct option: D:) conversion


©trb.springline.in

30. Many words came into English by this route: pease was once a mass noun (as in ‘pease pudding‘), but was reinterpreted as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation from the field of study ______

A:) logic

B:) statistics

C:) suffixation

D:) techniques

springline- Correct option: B:) statistics