ABSTRACT
Henry Sweet described by an admiring George Bernard Shaw as 'the brainiest Oxford don of his time', and he is best known to the public through Shaw's supposed transformation of him into the irascible phoneticians Professor Higgins in Pygmalion and later the musical My Fair Lady. The real Sweet was the son of a barrister at the Inner Temple. Sweet belonged to no particular school of philological thought, and much of what he has to say retains its general validity. The practical bias of his work emerges contentiously in The Practical Study of Languages where he ridicules rigidity of the scholarly establishment. 'Living philology', he insists, based upon the spoken word, and original fieldwork requires greater gifts than preparing endless editions of old texts. Phonetics is foundation of both language learning and dialectology, and he challenges 'some real University' to recognise that fact. In 1901 he was at last appointed to an Oxford University Readership in Phonetics.
