SWEET, Henry [1845–1912]. English philologist, phonetician, and grammarian. Born in London, and educated at King's College School, London, he matriculated in 1864 at the U. of Heidelberg. In 1871, while still an undergraduate, he edited King
ALFRED's translation of the
Cura Pastoralis for the Early English Text Society, his commentary laying the foundation of
OLD ENGLISH dialectology. Further works on Old English include:
An ANGLO-SAXON Reader (1876);
The Oldest English Texts (1885);
A Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (1896). In 1877, he had published
A Handbook of PHONETICS, which attracted attention among scholars and teachers of English on the Continent. He followed it with
Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885), adapted as
A Primer of Spoken English (1890). This was the first scientific description of educated London speech, the
ACCENT later known as
RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION. Sweet used phonetic script throughout this work, including specimens of connected speech in transcription. By emphasizing the spoken language and the use of phonetics he was a pioneer in
LANGUAGE TEACHING. His views on the subject were set out in
The Practical Study of Languages (1899). His last book on English
PRONUNCIATION was
The Sounds of English (1908). Bernard
SHAW, who regarded Sweet as a man of genius, writes in the preface of
Pygmalion about his ‘Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics’. The play's Professor Higgins, he says, is not a portrait of Sweet: ‘With Higgins's physique and temperament Sweet might have set the Thames on fire.’ There are, however, ‘touches of Sweet in the play’.
