Henry Sweet

15 January 1845, London, - 30 April 1912, Oxford. Nineteenth-century philologist, grammarian and phonetician. One of the founders and president of the International Phonetic Association. A pioneer in modern scientific phonetics. Sometimes regarded as the man who “taught phonetics to Europe and made England the birthplace of the modern science” (Howatt 181). Sweet is often believed to have been, at least partly, the model for Professor Higgins in G. B. Shaw's play Pygmalion.

Life and education

Henry Sweet was born in London, where he received his education at King's College School in Wimbledon. Apparently, there are only very few private details of his life recorded. One source states that Henry Sweet might have suffered from congenital short-sightedness, which isolated him socially (Wainger 558). Details like this, however, are mostly omitted in texts about Sweet, probably due to the fact that they are of very little significance. Between 1863 and 1864, he studied at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. After that year, he went back to London and worked in the office of a trading company. In 1869, he entered Balliol College in Oxford and graduated four years later in litterae humaniores. Sweet became president of the Philological Society from 1875-76 and from 1877-78 (Marshall 3). Later on, he became President of the International Phonetic Association from 1887 until his death. In 1901 he obtained a full-time post as reader in phonetics at Oxford University. Henry Sweet died in 1912 in Oxford.

Work, significance and reputation

Sweet's most important work probably is the Handbook of Phonetics in which he presents a method to transcribe the sounds of a language most exactly. He mainly based the symbols he used to represent speech sounds on the Latin alphabet and added, whenever necessary, new symbols, which he, for instance, took from Old English. Henry Sweet has probably played an important role for the development of the teaching of languages, as well, and was “the prime originator of an applied linguistic approach” to it (Howatt 180). However, this part of his work is less widely known than his work on phonetic notation (ibid.) Sweet is named as one of the developers of the first version of the International Phonetic Alphabet in the late nineteenth century (McArthur “IPA”), more precisely he created the Romic Alphabet, the direct ancestor of the IPA. In his function as the president of the Philological Society, Sweet was also deeply involved in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (Howatt 179). While some sources state that the fictional character of Professor Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion is based on Henry Sweet, Shaw himself clearly negates this in the preface of the play (Manis 6). However, he writes that "there are touches of Sweet in the play" (ibid.).

Some works by Sweet (chronologically)

A Handbook of Phonetics, including a Popular Exposition of the Principles of Spelling Reform. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1877.

“On the Practical Study of Language”, TPS 1882-84: 577-99.

Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885.

A Primer of Phonetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890.

A New English Grammar. Two Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892, 1898.

The Practical Study of Languages. A Guide for Teachers and Learners. London: Dent, 1899. Republished by Oxford University Press in 1964, edited by R. Mackin.

Bibliography

Christopher, David. British Culture: an Introduction. London: Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 1999.

Damousi, Joy / Deacon, Desley (eds.). Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity. Essays on the History of Sound. Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2007.

Howatt, A. P. R.. A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984.

Manis, Jim (ed.). Pygmalion. By George Bernard Shaw. E-book. Hazleton: Pennsylvania State University, 2004.

McArthur, Tom. "SWEET, Henry." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Retrieved January 15, 2011 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-SWEETHenry.html

McArthur, Tom. "INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 15 Jan. 2011 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

Strazny, Philipp (ed.). “Sweet, Henry” from Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 2. New York / Oxon: Fitzroy Dearborn / Taylor & Francis, 2005.

Wainger, Bertrand M.. "Henry Sweet: Shaw's Pygmalion", Studies in Philology 27:4 (Oct., 1930), 558-572.