Henry Sweet and English phonetics

Table of contents 2
Introduction 3
Phonetics as a Linguistic Discipline 4
Henry Sweet and english Phonetics 6
Bibliography 10

“No language is perfectly uniform over the whole of its area. Just as languages differ from each other in phonetic structure — in their sounds and pronunciation — so also dialects of the same language differ from each other more or less…
English, like all living languages, changes from generation to generation: slight and imperceptible as the differences in the pronunciation of father and son may appear to be, there is always some change under ordinary normal conditions…
A spoken language is, therefore, a vague and floating entity. As regards English, the very fixity of its written form gives all the freer play to the manifold influences which cause change.
A standard spoken language is, strictly speaking, an abstraction. No two speakers of Standard English pronounce exactly alike. And yet they all have something in common in almost every sound they utter. There are some peculiarities of pronunciation which pass unnoticed, while others, less as archaisms, vulgarisms, provincialisms, or affectations, as the case may be, by the majority of educated speakers”.
These are the words of the Henry Sweet, famous English philologist, grammarian, phonetician, and a impressive scholar with an exasperating personality, who laid some of the foundations for the academic study of Old English.
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 concepts have remained influential, and a number of his works continue to be in print, being used as course texts at colleges and universities.

 

Bernard Shaw, who considered Sweet as a man of genius, writes in the preface of Pygmalion (1912; better known, as its musical adaptation My fair lady) about Sweet's “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”.
Sweet died on 30 April 1912 in Oxford, of pernicious anaemia; he left no children.