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he importance of phonetics as the indispensable foundation of all study of language—whether that study be purely theoretical, or practical as well—is now generally admitted.” Henry Sweet opened hisHandbook of Phonetics with this declaration. Judged by his younger contemporary and the leading phonetician of the time, Daniel Jones (1881–1967), half a century later, this declaration was in fact premature. Though the community of language scholars was becoming aware of the importance of the studies of sounds, in particular speech sounds, there was not yet a well-defined discipline of phonetics. Although there had been rudimentary works on phonetics before, “it is no exaggeration to say that Sweet did in this work more for phonetics than all his predecessors put together,” a language scholar once judged. Sweet’s Handbook of Phonetics is significant in the history of the humanities in two major perspectives. First, it placed phonetics in the development of language studies in the nineteenth century up to Sweet’s time by connecting phonetics to philology and several fields. Second, as just discussed, the Handbook laid the foundation for modern phonetics. Indeed it was one of the founding documents for the discipline of phonetics. Sweet was arguably the best-known British philologist in the second half of the nineteenth century, other than his mentor at Oxford Max Müller (1823–1900), who was in fact born and educated a German. Sweet was not a typical student, not finishing his degree until near age thirty. Before his entrance to Oxford he had studied Germanic philology and comparative Indo-European philology (predecessor to today’s linguistics, often known as comparative philology) at Heidelberg. He began to publish on English philology while at Oxford, editing medieval texts and compiling Old English readers and dictionaries. He was an able philologist in the first place and had updated