Henry Sweet

Henry Sweet was born in St. Pancras in London. He was educated at Bruce Castle School and King's College School, London.[1][3] In 1864, he spent a short time studying at Heidelberg University.[1][4] Upon his return to England, he took up an office job with a trading company in London.[4] Five years later, aged twenty-four, he won a scholarship in German and entered Balliol College in Oxford.[4]

Sweet neglected his formal academic coursework, concentrating instead on pursuing excellence in his private studies.[4] Early recognition came in his first year at Oxford, when the prestigious Philological Society (whose President he was destined to become later on) published a paper of his on Old English.[4] In 1871, still an undergraduate, he edited King Alfred's translation of the Cura Pastoralis for the Early English Text Society (King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care: With an English Translation, the Latin Text, Notes, and an Introduction), his commentary establishing the foundation for Old English dialectology.[1] He graduated, nearly thirty years old, with a fourth-class degree in literae humaniores.[4] Subsequent works on Old English included An Anglo-Saxon Reader (1876), The Oldest English Texts (1885) and A Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (1896).[1]

Sweet, like his contemporary Walter Skeat, felt under particular pressure from German scholars in English studies who, often state-employed, tenured, and accompanied by their comitatus of eager graduate students, "annexed" the historical study of English. Dismayed by the "swarms of young program-mongers turned out every year by German universities," he felt that "no English dilettante can hope to compete with them—except by Germanizing himself and losing all his nationality."[5]

In 1877, Sweet published A Handbook of Phonetics, which attracted international attention among scholars and teachers of English in Europe.[1] He followed up with the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885), which was subsequently adapted as A Primer of Spoken English (1890).[1] This included the first scientific description of educated London speech, later known as received pronunciation, with specimens of connected speech represented in phonetic script.[1] In addition, he developed a version of shorthand called Current Shorthand, which had both orthographic and phonetic modes.[6] His emphasis on spoken language and phonetics made him a pioneer in language teaching, a subject which he covered in detail in The Practical Study of Languages (1899).[1] In 1901, Sweet was made reader in phonetics at Oxford.[7] The Sounds of English (1908) was his last book on English pronunciation.[1]

Other books by Sweet include An Icelandic Primer with Grammar, Notes and Glossary (1886), The History of Language (1900; 1995: ISBN 81-85231-04-4; 2007: ISBN 1-4326-6993-1), and a number of other works he edited for the Early English Text Society. Sweet was also closely involved in the early history of the Oxford English Dictionary.[4]

Despite the recognition he received for his scholarly work, Sweet never received a university professorship, a fact that disturbed him greatly, although he was appointed reader. He had done poorly as a student at Oxford, he had annoyed many people through bluntness, and he failed to make every effort to gather official support.[4] His relationship with the Oxford University Press was often strained.[4]

Sweet died on 30 April 1912 in Oxford, of pernicious anemia; he left no children.[2]

In Who's Who, 1911, Sweet gave his recreations as:

Climbing, gardening, chemistry, alphabets, in boyhood; swimming, skating, European languages and literatures, in youth; riding, fishing, cycling, literary controversy, spelling and university reform, oriental languages and literatures, in middle age; sociology, spiritualism, music, literary composition, in old age—looked forward to flying: real flying, not with bags and stoves![3]

Sweet has retained a reputation as "the man who taught Europe phonetics".[4] His work established an applied linguistics tradition in language teaching which has continued without interruption to the present day.[4]

A bibliography and Collected Papers were published by H. C. Wyld.

In the preface to his play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw, after describing Sweet, stated that "[Henry] Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play."[1]

The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas (founded 1984) is named after him. It holds annual colloquia, and publishes the journal Language and History.

• Charles Leslie Wrenn, 'Henry Sweet', Transactions of the Philological Society; vol. 45, pp. 177–201 (1946)
• Henderson, Eugénie J. A., ed. (1971). The indispensable foundation: a selection from the writings of Henry Sweet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0194370394.
• Anthony Philip Reid Howatt, H. G. Widdowson (2004). A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-442185-6.

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Henry Sweet

• The Henry Sweet Society
• Works by Henry Sweet at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Henry Sweet at Internet Archive
• Works by Henry Sweet at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Anthony Philip Reid Howatt, H. G. Widdowson (2004). A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-442185-6.
• Henry Sweet's The Principles of Spelling Reform
• An Anglo-Saxon primer Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. {Reprinted by} Cornell University Library Digital Collections