B**T
A Handbook of Phonetics; Henry Sweet
Sweet's interests in the older Germanic languages began relatively early. One of his schoolteachers (and an Anglo-Saxonist), Thomas Oswald Cockayne (1807-1873), may have been instrumental in introducing him to the two languages. On leaving school, he undertook a year's study of Comparative and Germanic Philology at Heidelberg University. A consequence was that he began to collect materials during his teenage years for what was later to become his Student's dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (1897). While he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, his edition of King Alfred's Pastoral Care was published.He read Classics (`Greats') at Oxford, but he was hardly assiduous, spending most of his time working, virtually alone, in the field of Germanic languages. At the time of his graduation, he had published not only the Pastoral Care, but had critically reviewed a number of scholarly works in the academic press, and had read three papers to the Philological Society. Within a year of graduating, he published his History of English sounds (1874).Throughout his life, he maintained a wide spectrum of academic interests, including phonetics, spelling reform, shorthand, grammar, the teaching and learning of languages, general linguistics, the history of English and other Germanic languages, and literature. Since he had to fulfill two roles, that of the scholar and, secondly, the private teacher whose books for undergraduates and other learners would generate a certain amount of income, he adopted the general strategy of publishing advanced material first, then simplifying some of it in works written intentionally for the student learner.Meetings of the Philological Society in London were the locus for the exposition of many of his views on language and languages, and he read papers there on a variety of subjects, especially the contemporary forms of a number of languages, including Danish, German, Icelandic, Irish Gaelic, and Swedish. In his later years, his field of interest widened to take account of aspects of the linguistic structure of Arabic, Chinese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Sanskrit, and Welsh.His Handbook of phonetics (1877) inspired a whole tradition of phonetic studies, especially in Britain and Europe. It expounds a general phonetic theory, illustrated by phonetic transcriptions of various languages, and concludes with an excursus on the nature of phonetic notational systems, including a pivotal discussion of Broad and Narrow Romic notations--equivalent in most respects to phonemic and allophonic notations.
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