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| Henry Sweet |
The Linguist’s Calendar: September 15
1845: Birth of Henry Sweet, English linguist and phonetician. Sweet was the real-life model for Henry Higgins of Pygmalion.
1975: In what is surely one of the more facetious attempts to coin an epicene pronoun to replace he and she, Joel Weiss of Northbrook, Illinois blends he, or, she and it into h’orsh’it.
1999: The Turkish government’s Directorate General of Press and Information reports that Turkish is now spoken by no less than 200 million people, making it the 7th language of the world in terms of number of speakers. Most non-Turkish estimates put the number at slightly more than 60 million, putting it in 19th place among the world’s languages.
2002: Parliamentary elections in Sweden. The liberal party Folkpartiet gets a surprisingly high percentage of the votes, due to their proposal that knowledge of Swedish be a prerequisite for citizenship.
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