Philologist, born in London, UK. He became reader in phonetics at Oxford, where he pioneered Anglo-Saxon studies. His works include Old and Middle English texts, primers, and dictionaries, and a historical English grammar. He was the probable source for Professor Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion (1913).
Henry Sweet (1845-1912) was a philologist, and is also considered to be an early linguist. He specialized in the Germanic languages, particularly Anglo-Saxon (an early version of English), Old Icelandic, and West Saxon.
Some of the books he wrote are Handbook on Phonetics (1877), Oldest English Texts (1885), and Primer of Old Icelandic (1888). George Bernard Shaw described Henry Higgins (a character in Pygmalion) to be a largely accurate portrayal of Sweet in the preface to that play.
A bibliography and Collected Papers were published by H.
Further reading
Charles Leslie Wrenn, 'Henry Sweet', Transactions of the Philological Society 46.177-201 (1946)
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