ABSTRACT
In the field of linguistics, it has been said with some truth that the English have excelled in phonetics and in lexicography. They have always been interested in the spelling of their language, which has the longest literary tradition in Western Europe. The English were the first to make use of their native language in law, chronicle, and translation. The first grammar of Latin in a Western European language was written by the Anglo-Saxon Aelfric in the tenth century. I have elsewhere (1946) given some account of the English interest in spelling and pronunciation, culminating in an appreciation of our greatest philologist, Henry Sweet.
