Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912?

Re:Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912? by cocok on Sunday October 27, 2024 @11:49PM (#41967696)

The teachers misspelled Serbia and Romania, but expect little American kids to know where these are.

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Re:Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912? by userbinator on Sunday October 27, 2024 @11:55PM (#41967727)

Those appear to be the historically correct spellings:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Roumania

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Servia

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Re:Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912? by drewcoo on Monday October 28, 2024 @12:44AM (#41967937)

They were in sorta different places then . . .

Remember that big hot war in the 90s?

And there was that thing in the 40s, too . . .

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Re:Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912? by cocok on Monday October 28, 2024 @01:36AM (#41968109)

> Remember that big hot war in the 90s?

Ah, when the Servians shot down the invisible airplane, because they didn't see it. I remember :-)

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Re:Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912? by jcranmer on Monday October 28, 2024 @01:01AM (#41967992)

The Balkans of 112 years ago did not look like the Balkans of today (for starters, Serbia no longer borders Turkey), and countries' spelling changes over time. For example, Turkey now desires that English-speaking people use Türkiye instead.

But maybe it's too much to ask of modern Americans to understand that spellings of proper nouns can and do change over time.

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Re:Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912? by fallingknife on Monday October 28, 2024 @06:02AM (#41969449)

So did you. The correct spelling of "Serbia" is Србија, or Srbija. Anything else is arbitrary.

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