Henry Sweet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Henry Sweet (1845-1912) was a philologist and is also considered an early linguist. He specialized in the Germanic languages, particularly Anglo-Saxon (Old English), Old Icelandic, and West Saxon. In addition, Sweet published works on larger issues of phonetics and grammar in language. Some of his ideas are still discussed, and a number of his works continue to be in print, being used as course texts at colleges and universities.
Books authored by him include Handbook on Phonetics (1877), Oldest English Texts (1885), Primer of Old Icelandic (1888), and The History of Language (1900; 1995: ISBN 81-85231-04-4; 2007: ISBN 1-4326-6993-1). He also edited several books for the Early English Text Society. He never managed to get a professorship with a university, which disturbed him greatly; he had done poorly in school, he had annoyed many people through bluntness, and failed to take every effort to gather official support.[1] 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.'
A bibliography and Collected Papers were published by H. C. Wyld.
[edit] Further reading
- Charles Leslie Wrenn, 'Henry Sweet', Transactions of the Philological Society 46.177-201 (1946)
[edit] References
- ^ Anthony Philip Reid Howatt, Henry George Widdowson: A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press (2004), S. 198–201. ISBN 0-19-442185-6 (Online-Text)
[edit] External links
- Biography in A History of English Language Teaching
- Works by Henry Sweet at Project Gutenberg
- Henry Sweet's The Principles of Spelling Reform
- An Anglo-Saxon primer Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. {Reprinted by} Cornell University Library Digital Collections
