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# A Short Historical English Grammar

**Authors:** [Henry Sweet](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/henry-sweet/) · **Year:** 1892 · **Venue:** Oxford: Clarendon Press **Link:** [archive.org/details/ashorthistorica00sweegoog](https://archive.org/details/ashorthistorica00sweegoog) · **Licence:** [public domain](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/) (author died 1912, more than 70 years ago; published 1892, before 1931 in the US)

grammar-book[licence](https://archive.org/details/ashorthistorica00sweegoog)

- [Publisher's page](https://archive.org/details/ashorthistorica00sweegoog)
- [PDF](https://archive.org/download/ashorthistorica00sweegoog/ashorthistorica00sweegoog.pdf)

**Authors (1)**

1. Henry Sweet

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Sweet's short grammar is an abridgment of the historical parts of his New English Grammar. Its aim is to give students an up-to-date account of English phonology, dialectology and chronology, with careful separation of what is in living use from what is obsolete. It leaves out Grimm's and Verner's laws, which belong to comparative Aryan philology. The book covers sounds of Old, Middle and Modern English, then accidence: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, particles, prepositions, interjections, and composition. Verbs are arranged by period. In the outline, Old English strong and weak verbs are at §§ 486 and 498, preterite-presents at § 507, and the Modern English irregular verbs at §§ 586 to 634, grouped by how the preterite vowel changed (for example to e, oo or o) and by consonant loss. The method is descriptive and ordered by sound change; no counts are given.

## Ideas

- I1. Build a class table for `en/src/morph.rs` from Sweet's Modern English irregular verb groups (§§ 586 to 634): one entry per group, with the preterite pattern. Keep it a closed table in BTreeMap order, so each lemma can say which group and rule it came from.
- I2. Give the preterite-presents (§ 507: can, shall, may, must and the rest) their own rule in the lemmatiser, instead of treating them as irregular verbs. Measure the tagger and lemmatiser on those words in the school lessons.
- I3. Use Sweet's Old English strong-verb classes (§ 486) as a checklist for [14. Irregular verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/14-irregular-verbs/): each Modern English irregular verb gets the class it descends from. Report the coverage.

## For Mova

The chapters are [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/13-verbs/) and [14. Irregular verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/14-irregular-verbs/); the modal verbs fit [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/13-verbs/) too. The code is `en/src/morph.rs` (lemmatiser and inflection) and `en/src/udreg.rs` for the features. The measure: lemma accuracy on the irregular and modal verbs in the school lessons, split by Sweet's group, run twice.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@book{sweet1892short,
  title = {{A Short Historical English Grammar}},
  author = {Sweet, Henry},
  year = {1892},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/ashorthistorica00sweegoog}
}
```

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