Touches of Sweet -- Was Sweet sweet? 04

I have written before a little about the name and its meaning (Names and their meanings 01), and here I wonder what sort of person Henry Sweet was like. From what I read in "Pygmalion" and other articles about this formidable phonetician, his character seems to have been quite the opposite to his name.

Henry Sweet was an avid scholar of phonetics, and Shaw recalls him as the best of them all, but his extraordinarily fiery zeal towards his subject had ironically stood in his way to popularize his subject and his study outcomes and to entitle him to high official recognition.

Shaw writes in the preface of "Pygmalion" about Sweet's non-sweet character when Sweet was made as a reader of phonetics at Oxford:

...he had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something called Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the university to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly; and to him all scholars who were not rabid phoneticians were fools.

Too strong in character, too fiery as an academic, too narrow in sociability, but Shaw must have respected and loved Sweet very much.

to be continued.

Touches of Sweet -- new writing and Henry Sweet 03

Another entry on our formidable phonetician, Henry Sweet

As we saw in my previous entry Phoneticians as Reformers 02, phoneticians in the 19th century devoted their knowledge in inventing new systems of writing or orthography. They tried to find ways to sincerely represent their speech sound and words, to record more efficiently than longhand. Bernard Shaw invented the Shavian alphabet, Isaac Pitman invented the Pitman Shorthand, and our Henry Sweet was no exception. Sweet invented the Current Shorthand, and it is alluded in Shaw's "Pygmalion"

Henry Higgins in "Pygmalion" introduces himself to Colonel Pickering as the author of ''Higgins' Universal Alphabet'. Higgins seems to have invented and patented his shorthand, and in act three of the play, we find out that uses his shorthand in his regular correspondence:

Mrs. Higgins
No use, dear. I'm sorry; but I cant get round your vowels; and though I like to get pretty postcards in your patent shorthand, I always have to read the copies in ordinary writing you so thoughtfully send me.
(note: Bernard Shaw did not use apostrophes when he wrote.)

This scene is written from Shaw's experience of when he used to receive postcards from Henry Sweet in his Current Shorthand. There even was a manual published by the Claredon Press for a four and sixpenny in his days.

Shaw highly praises Sweet's Current Shorthand. He says in the preface of "Pygmalion" as below.

... the whole point of his Current Shorthand is that it can well express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you...  .... His true objective was the provision of a full accurate, legible script for our language...

Current Shorthand may have been perfect in describing the language, but it was not so widely received. Why? We have to see how sweet Sweet was in life.

to be continued.

"breakthrough"

I came across the following passage the other day:

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Many attempts were made to reform the situation, expand higher education, and introduce practical subjects into the curriculum, but they all came up against entrenched conservative forces. The breakthough came in 1826 when a University College was founded in London with a charter to award...
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"Breakthough"?

This is in the original passage, so usually, when citing, I should put [sic] right after "breakthough," indicating that the part is "incorrectly written."

In this case, the problem is a spelling error, which should have been "breakthrough."
"Through" has such a tricky spelling indeed that it sometimes ruins the efforts of writer's revision. There are some words with the close spelling: though, thorough, tough, throw. . .

According to "Hellog" website, "through" in late Middle English has as many as 515 different ways in spelling. You can see all the spellings in the following page:

http://user.keio.ac.jp/~rhotta/hellog/2009-06-20-1.html

It's simply amazing how people of the time were able to recognise the word form and its meaning. Apparently, the multiple spelling from is based on each scribe's habit of writing.

The diverse nature of English spelling in the Middle Ages far surpasses our modern expectation and conception!

Phoneticians as Reformers 02

Phoneticians of 19th century

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds and how they are produced, but phoneticians in the 19th century worked in a little different way from what they do today. In those days there were phoneticians who proposed or developed new system of writing to faithfully represent how the words were pronounced.

English spelling has many irregularities. A very famous example displaying the irregularity is the clever respelling of "fish" as "ghoti" ( 'gh' as in 'enough', 'o' as in 'women', and 'ti' as in 'nation').

Why so many irregularities? Here are some of many reasons.
-Words came into English from foreign languages retaining their original spelling but the pronunciation adapted to English.
-There was the Great Vowel Shift that changed the pronunciation of Middle English long vowels but the spelling staying as is.
-There were words which the spelling were reformed to reflect Greek or Latin etymology.

Phoneticians thought 26 letters in the alphabet were just not enough to phonetically describe the English words accurately -- too many irregularities, no standardized spelling or pronunciation. This issue was one of the motivations for Bernard Shaw to write "Pygmalion" (Phoneticians as Reformers 01).

Here are what phoneticians of the 19th century did to tackle the issue of the inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation:
-Regularizing: applying existing spelling rules more consistently. Some were proposed by an American English-language spelling reformer Noah Webster, and resulted in the difference in American and British spelling.
-Standardizing: Using the English alphabet and adding new diagraph (eg. <th> →/ð/, <ng>→/ŋ/), new spelling was proposed. This was proposed by Issac Pitman, who also invented shorthand system that is widely used in Britain.
-Renewing: replacing all alphabet with newly invented symbols. Bernard Shaw invented the Shavian alphabet. It had 48 letters all looking nothing like the Latin alphabet, and were "phonemic" as possible.

Against the effort of the reformers of the 19th century, English still retains its irregularities in spelling and inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation, and diverse Englishes flourish in different parts of the world.

"Friends-free" ?

A follow-up to Smoke-free

What did "free" mean originally?

Used in the times of Old English, "free" originally referred to being a state of "not in servitude to another." Therefore, "free" person is the one that has "personal, social, and political rights as a member of a society or state." (OED, s. v. "free" 1)

It is not a coincidence that "free" and "friend" look similar.
"friend." comes from the present participle of the verb "free," so the former is so-called "derivative"!

The first citation of "friend" is from Beowulf, the oldest heroic poem in English literature.

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... Heorot innan wæs
freondum afylled; nalles facenstafas
Þeodscyldingas þenden fremedon. (1017-19)

(Heorot inside was filled with friends. . .)
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Heorot is a place where Beowulf and his retinues stay and feast together.
"Friends" gathering here has a sense of intimacy with each other, belonging to the same tribal community.

Some day, people will get more familiar with the use of "free" in the sense of "clear of/free of" and expand on it. For example, some people might begin to say something like,

     "I just don't need any friends around me. I'm absolutely OK with being "friends-free"!

"Friend" and "free" meets up miraculously and are integrated into one after their long individual journey.

Phoneticians as Reformers 01

Late 19th century London must have already been a melting pot of people of all over the country. After the Enclosure and the Industrial Revolution, many people who used to be farmers living in the countryside moved to the cities and settled as the working class. You could imagine all kinds of dialects spoken there. From the preface of "Pygmalion", we can see the grief of Shaw towards the English and the language of his days.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants - and not all of them - have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it: and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

Henry Higgins of "My Fair Lady" also sings as above his irritation towards the English in "Why can't the English?"

What Shaw idealized must be "one common language", universalized in grammar, in sound, and phonetically sincere in writing. He further writes in the preface of his play:


The reformer we need most today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of the play.


Shaw considered phoneticians not just as scholars, but as reformers of language; professionals who can save the language from "evils".

to be continued.