Henry Sweet

Henry Sweet (15 September 1845 – 30 April 1912) was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian. In 1864, he spent a short time studying at Heidelberg University. The Oldest English Texts and A Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (1896).

In 1877, Sweet published A Handbook of Phonetics, which attracted international attention among scholars and teachers of English in Europe. 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). The Sounds of English (1908) was his last book on English pronunciation. ), 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. His relationship with the Oxford University Press was often strained.

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

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

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

In the preface to his 1913 play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw 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." Leslie Howard portrayed the character of Higgins in the 1938 film Pygmalion; Henry Higgins was notably portrayed by Rex Harrison in the 1956 stage musical My Fair Lady and its 1964 screen adaptation.

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.