[Ads-l] OT: pronunciation of French scientist's name, DeBroglie

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Jan 29 19:18:35 UTC 2018


Given that -gli- is merely the Italian spelling of /λ/ and the name, _de
Broglio_ has been frenchified to _de Broglie_ and the sound, /λ/, has
become yod in French, as it has in many varieties of Spanish, my WAG is
that there is no _l_ pronounced in the French version of this name
ultimately of Italian - Corsican? - origin.


On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 12:43 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> > On Jan 29, 2018, at 12:11 PM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at MST.EDU>
> wrote:
> >
> > A student has asked me the pronunciation of the French name
> > DeBroglie.  The pronunciation is available on bing.com,
> > but as often as I listen to it, I can't decide whether the
> > woman is pronouncing the "I" (third letter from end)
> > or not.
> >
> > Would any native speakers of French on this list
> > be able to provide a definitive answer? It would
> > be much appreciated.
> >
> > Gerald Cohen
>
> Interesting.  I’m not a native speaker, but I do feel reasonably confident
> in how I pronounce French, yet I’d have guessed wrong here.  If you check
> the wikipedia entry for the eponymous physicist at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Broglie you’ll get the IPA
> rendering of his name as [dəbʁɔj] or [dəbʁœj] and you’re also linked to a
> sound file at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:De_Broglie.ogg.  In each
> case, there’s no lateral consonant in the pronunciation, and in fact if I
> were transcribing what I hear at the sound file, I’d have come up with “de
> Breuil” (in which the final <l> is definitely silent). (This matches the
> second of the two phonetic forms in the wiki-entry.)  Who knew?
>
> I do remember that the 1960’s-era pitcher for the Cardinals and Cubs,
> Ernie Broglio, mostly famous for his part in an historically lopsided trade
> for Hall of Famer Lou Brock, pronounced his name with an /l/.  Neither here
> nor there, however.
>
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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