Coordinates | 56°09′″N40°25′″N |
---|---|
Name | Henry Sweet |
Birth date | 15 September 1845 |
Birth place | London |
Death date | April 30, 1912 |
Death place | Oxford |
Nationality | British |
Field | Phonetics, Old English, language teaching |
Work institutions | Early English Text Society, Philological Society, Oxford University |
Alma mater | Balliol College |
Signature | }} |
As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic languages, particularly Old English and Old Norse. In addition, Sweet published works on larger issues of phonetics and grammar in language and the teaching of languages. Many of his ideas have remained influential, and a number of his works continue to be in print, being used as course texts at colleges and universities.
Sweet neglected his formal academic coursework, concentrating instead on pursuing excellence in his private studies. 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. In 1871, still an undergraduate, he edited King Alfred's translation of the Cura Pastorialis 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. He graduated, nearly thirty years old, with a fourth-class degree in literae humaniores. 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).
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 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."
In 1877, Sweet published A Handbook of Phonetics, which attracted international attention among scholars and teachers of English in Europe. He followed up with the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885), which was subsequently adapted as A Primer of Spoken English (1890). This included the first scientific description of educated London speech, later known as received pronunciation, with specimens of connected speech represented in phonetic script. 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). In 1901, Sweet was made reader in phonetics at Oxford. The Sounds of English (1908) was his last book on English pronunciation.
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.
Despite the recognition he received for his scholarly work, Sweet never received a university professorship, a fact that disturbed him greatly; 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. His relationship with the Oxford University Press was often strained.
Sweet died on 30 April 1912 in Oxford, of pernicious anemia; he left no children.
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 "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."
Category:1845 births Category:1912 deaths Category:Anglo-Saxon studies scholars Category:People educated at King's College School, Wimbledon Category:English philologists Category:Phoneticians Category:Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Category:Grammarians of English Category:Old Brucastrians
de:Henry Sweet fr:Henry Sweet nl:Henry Sweet sh:Henri Svit sv:Henry SweetThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The World News (WN) Network, has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to user privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for wn.com, as well as e-mail newsletters.
We do not collect personally identifiable information about you, except when you provide it to us. For example, if you submit an inquiry to us or sign up for our newsletter, you may be asked to provide certain information such as your contact details (name, e-mail address, mailing address, etc.).
When you submit your personally identifiable information through wn.com, you are giving your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as set forth in this Privacy Policy. If you would prefer that we not collect any personally identifiable information from you, please do not provide us with any such information. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to third parties without your consent, except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy.
Except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy, we will use the information you provide us only for the purpose of responding to your inquiry or in connection with the service for which you provided such information. We may forward your contact information and inquiry to our affiliates and other divisions of our company that we feel can best address your inquiry or provide you with the requested service. We may also use the information you provide in aggregate form for internal business purposes, such as generating statistics and developing marketing plans. We may share or transfer such non-personally identifiable information with or to our affiliates, licensees, agents and partners.
We may retain other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Such third parties may be provided with access to personally identifiable information needed to perform their functions, but may not use such information for any other purpose.
In addition, we may disclose any information, including personally identifiable information, we deem necessary, in our sole discretion, to comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal proceeding or governmental request.
We do not want you to receive unwanted e-mail from us. We try to make it easy to opt-out of any service you have asked to receive. If you sign-up to our e-mail newsletters we do not sell, exchange or give your e-mail address to a third party.
E-mail addresses are collected via the wn.com web site. Users have to physically opt-in to receive the wn.com newsletter and a verification e-mail is sent. wn.com is clearly and conspicuously named at the point of
collection.If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by e-mailing us at michaelw(at)wn.com
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during registration and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure, however. Therefore, though we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If we decide to change our e-mail practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we think appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
If we make material changes to our e-mail practices, we will notify you here, by e-mail, and by means of a notice on our home page.
The advertising banners and other forms of advertising appearing on this Web site are sometimes delivered to you, on our behalf, by a third party. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, the third party may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information on cookies, you can visit www.cookiecentral.com.
As we continue to develop our business, we might sell certain aspects of our entities or assets. In such transactions, user information, including personally identifiable information, generally is one of the transferred business assets, and by submitting your personal information on Wn.com you agree that your data may be transferred to such parties in these circumstances.