Born: London, 15 September 1845
Died: Oxford, 30 April 1912
In 1877, Sweet published A Handbook of Phonetics, which
attracted international attention among scholars and teachers of English in
Europe. He followed up with
the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885), which was
subsequently adapted as A Primer of Spoken English (1890). This included
the first scientific description of educated London speech, later known as Received Pronunciation, with specimens
of connected speech represented in phonetic script. In addition, he developed a version of
shorthand called Current Shorthand, which had both orthographic and phonetic
modes. 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). In
1901, Sweet was made reader in phonetics at Oxford. The Sounds of English (1908) was his last book on English
pronunciation.
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