영어 음과 철자 그리고 음 변화: 스위트와 예스퍼슨의 비교를 중심으로

English Sounds, Spellings, and Sound Changes: A Comparative Study of Sweet and Jespersen

This paper compares Sounds and Spellings, which was published in 1909 as part one of A Modern English Grammar (MEG!) by Otto Jespersen, with History of English Sounds (HES), a correspondent book by Henry Sweet, Which was published in 1885, about 25 years ahead of MEGI. While the purpose of MEGI, as Jespersen himself defined in the introduction, is to examine the discrepancy between English sounds and spellings by tracing the sound changes in English, that of HES is to specifically suggest a new form of spellings for English and other European languages, attested in real sound changes of English. Therefore, the first point of comparison inevitably goes to how Jespersen and Sweet define the relationship between English sounds and spellings with respect to sound changes in English. The second point of comparison is how they view sound changes in general with respect to their scope and regularity as their theoretical perspective of sound changes focuses on the regularity and graduality of sound changes. Section 2 is a brief introduction to HES and MEGI. Section 3 discusses the relationship between English sounds and spellings defined by Sweet and Jespersen. Section 4 reevaluates their view of sound changes. Section 1 is the introduction and Section 5 the conclusion.