Hi John
Here is the preface. I attached it below. Please examine it.
I structured it a little and added line numbers.
I noted some incredible run-on sentences, but all told it does give
some insight into the main character of Henry Higgins, and
G.B.Shaw's intent to show his namesake, Henry Sweet
in a stronger more positive light.
He patches the crackpot and makes it a magical instrument, to
convert a barbarian into something more than
just a model of refined Lady.
I examined the first 41 statements
I eliminated the last few lines of the Preface for later perusal.
How shall it be presented. Footnotes, perhaps. Or inserted piecemeal
into the story.
Regards, Paul v.
_______________attached__________________
PREFACE TO PYGMALION.
1. (About) a Professor of Phonetics.
2. As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface,
but a sequel (Conclusion?),
which I have supplied in its due place. (Afterword)
3. The English have no respect for their language, and will not
teach their own children to speak it.
4. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach
himself what it sounds like.
5. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth
without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.
6. German and Spanish (at least) are accessible to foreigners:
7. English is not accessible even to Englishmen.
8. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic
enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero
of this soon to be popular play.
9. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for
many years past.
10. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of
the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J.
Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head
always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would
apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner.
11. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran,
were men whom it was impossible to dislike.
12. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of
character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals
as Ibsen or Samuel Butler.
13. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of
them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official
recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but
for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in
general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics.
14. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South
Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced
the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from
Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject.
15. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive
attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet
regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only.
16. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible
to be published; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its
author into the limelight.
17. When I met him (Henry Sweet) afterwards, for the first time for
many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite
tolerably presentable young man, 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.
18. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was
squeezed into something called a Readership of phonetics there.
19. 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 intensely Oxonian way.
20. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires
that may be published without too destructive results fifty years
hence.
21. He was, I believe, not inthe least an ill-natured man: very much
the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.
22. Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to
the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and
which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published
by the Clarendon Press.
23. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins describes are such as I have
received from Sweet.
24. I would decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr,
and a Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what
on earth it meant.
25. (Henry) Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity,
would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word
Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of
making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on
earth.
26. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications
was beyond Sweet's patience.
27. Therefore, though the whole point of his "Current Shorthand"
is that it can 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.
28. His unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite
legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own
practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms.
29. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate,
legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was
led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of
Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system.
30. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business
organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn
Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and
transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where
experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency.
31. (Henry) Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion.
32. He might as well have been the Sybil (Delphi Oracle) who tore up
the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to.
33. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in
his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized,
may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon
the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but
until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman.
34. I have bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am
informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a
steady and healthy one.
35. I actually learned the system two several times;
and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is
Pitman's.
36. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe
Sweet, having been perforce taught in the schools of Pitman.
37. Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed
at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave
no popular vogue to Current Shorthand.
38. Pygmalion's (Henry) Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom
the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still,
as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play.
39. With Higgins's physique and temperament Sweet might have set the
Thames on fire.
40. As it was, he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an
extent that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure
of Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign
specialists in his subject.
41. I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite
right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings
(heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements); for
although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a
seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly
relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the
best places for less important subjects which they profess
without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them,
still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot
expect them to heap honors on him.
________________________________attached________________________
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "paul vandenbrink"
<pvandenbrink11@...> wrote:
>
> Hi John
> I downloaded it as well.
> Upon looking at the text,
> I think we need to consider how to format the story.
> The Form of the story is a first a Preface or Commentary
> on the Phonetics of English, and then a description of some
> of the famous Linguists
> of his time. There is also a Paean on the success of this play
> even though it is full of idaes and their explanations.