Henry Sweet

Sweet was the greatest of the few historical linguists whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany, but, unlike the German scholars, Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the workings of the vocal organs. (Such phonetic research as took place in Germany was carried out mainly by physiologists with little interest in linguistic questions.) According to C.T. Onions in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sweet’s Handbook of Phonetics of 1877 ‘taught phonetics to Europe and made England the birthplace of the modern science’. (Sweet was the original of ‘Professor Higgins’ in Shaw’s Pygmalion, turned into a musical under the title of My Fair Lady. He worked as a private scholar throughout his life; largely because of personal animosities, and to the amazement of foreign linguists, he was never appointed to any of the academic positions to which his work and publications entitled him).

Sweets phonetics was practical as well as academic; he was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform-the full title of the handbook just cited continuous with the words including a popular exposition of the principles of spelling reform. Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which for him was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthographic.
Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones (1881-1967).

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