I rewatched Bullitt and was gripped once more by what this Wikipedia article calls “the first modern car chase movie.” But that is not a topic for LH; it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what kind of a name Bullitt is, and that makes for a post (a thin one, perhaps, but it’s hot for the umpteenth straight day and my brains are poached). It’s not in my usual surname reference, but happily the information in the Dictionary of American Family Names is online; the Bullitt entry says it’s a variant of Bullett, and that entry says:
Bullett : 1: Altered form of French Boulet reflecting the Canadian and American French practice of sounding the final -t. Compare Bullitt.2: English (Suffolk): of Norman origin probably a nickname for a rotund person from a diminutive of Old French boule ‘round’. The noun bullet is from French boulet a diminutive of boule ‘ball’.3: English (Suffolk): occasionally perhaps a late development of Bulled ‘bull head’.
I don’t know if “the Canadian and American French practice of sounding the final -t” is an accurate generalization or an ad hoc explanation.
There’s also Bulliet (e.g. historian Richard, who has done interesting work) and Bulleit (e.g. fancy hooch).
There’s also Bulliet (e.g. historian Richard, who has done interesting work)
He has indeed — I’ve got a couple of his books. I guess that has the same origin?
It’s a great chase scene, and one of the ways you can tell how revolutionary it was when it was filmed is actually the technical problems with it. A modern editor could get fired for all the continuity errors, large and small, but Peter Yates and Frank Keller had nobody they could go to with experience in how to film and cut together that kind of action sequence.
It’s also kind of amazing in retrospect that in films like Bullitt and The Great Escape, the insurers let one of the world’s most bankable stars do a lot of his own stunt driving.
Lalo Schifrin, who wrote the soundtrack score to Bullitt, passed away only two weeks ago.
“I don’t know if ‘the Canadian and American French practice of sounding the final -t’ is an accurate generalization or an ad hoc explanation.”
For whatever it’s worth, the Acadian surname Doucet (as in BBC News’s Lyse Doucet) is definitely pronounced with the final -t, as is the toponym Caraquet (which is Mi’kmaq via Acadian French).
Thanks, very interesting!
FWIW, the great québécoise comics artist Julie Doucet pronounces her name without the -t (and with a noticeably open final vowel), here (Facebook), 0:19.
Apropos of which, this guy’s accent is unfamiliar to me (as are most French regional accents). I wonder what it is.
The final t is pronounced in the French Canadian surname Ouellet as well as in the towns of Nicolet in Quebec and Caraquet in New Brunswick (at least in the local pronunciations). Wikipedia says that Pomquet in Nova Scotia is pronounced [pɔ̃kɛ] in French, but I hear [pɔmkɛt] in online videos.
The retention of final t is also found in the Reunionese surname Payet [pajɛt].
Edit: I missed that Simplicissimus already mentioned Caraquet. Also, as Y points out, this is by no means a general phenomenon in Canadian French. I’m only aware of a handful of examples; I’ve already listed all the ones I could think of for now.
Edit 2: As for the accent in the second video that Y linked to, it just sounds to me like pretty typical Metropolitan French that one might hear in Paris. But I don’t have a very good ear for French accents.
The final t is also pronounced in a number of -ot names in Canadian French. Sophiane Méthot, a Canadian trampoline gymnast, pronounces the final t in her surname; ditto for Canadian ice hockey player Thomas Chabot.
@Y re Thomas Rivière
He has two hats (St. Exupery heir/ brand manager and comics author/fan).
https://www.babelio.com/auteur/Thomas-Riviere/430723
https://www.ouest-france.fr/culture/livres/lire-magazine/l-heritier-de-saint-exupery-ne-veut-pas-que-les-gens-fassent-n-importe-quoi-avec-le-petit-prince-ac2517f0-372e-11ec-bdbf-686ac9091013
Arrière-petit-neveu d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Thomas Rivière veille sur l’héritage de son aïeul à travers la marque du Petit Prince.
According to
https://copainsdavant.linternaute.com/p/thomas-riviere-121548
he went to school in Arles and Montpellier, maybe you are getting a Southwest timbre (but not phonology).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I7QamflqU-0&list=PLg3xeEHdkMuEETz9afLm9UU2wRb51SQFJ&index=161&pp=iAQB
The only definite thing I can find in this video is:
~1.00
une-e foire de questions (réalisation d’e muet or Parisian tic?)
His realisation of final r is sometimes for me unexpected and almost like a non-rhotic English accent in French, but someone will tell me this is a minor speech particularity and not an accent per se. : pah, Solah.
The final t is pronounced in the French Canadian surname Ouellet
This was true of the Ouellets I knew grewing up in New Hampshire. Except in my town that family spelled (spells) their name “Ouelette”. I wonder if it’s a different name or if at some point an American French teacher in early 20th century Manchester told French Canadian immigrants how they should spell their name after hearing them say it?
It’s also kind of amazing in retrospect that in films like Bullitt and The Great Escape, the insurers let one of the world’s most bankable stars do a lot of his own stunt driving.
The Steve McQueen motorcycle scenes in The Great Escape are kind of jarring – they are fun but clearly jammed in to get an American audience excited. Was there never a British version of the movie with the McQueen scenes edited out?
Ouellette is a popular variant in Canada; I know someone who uses that spelling myself. I think it must be natural spelling variation that can’t necessarily be blamed on those Anglos.
There are also cases of final t being pronounced in France itself, especially place names: Anet, Annot, Carnet, Le Fossat, Lot, Massat, Plancoët, Plouaret, Quérigut, Vallet…
The fact that the t is pronounced in Moët as in the champagne also trips up lots of people.
These exceptions to the rule of silent final t seem to occur mostly in more peripheral regions such as Brittany, which would make sense if these were holdovers from earlier pronunciations before the influences from the centre led to the general dropping of final t.
But the process is probably continuing, and my impression is that the t seems to be becoming silent in a number of place names where it was previously reported to be pronounced.
The t in Lot is pronounced both for the river and the biblical figure. The same applies to biblical names Japhet and Josaphat if I’m not mistaken. Biblical names usually retain final consonants in pronunciation, as in David, Élisabeth, and Job.
There’s a very Proustian riff somewhere in À la recherche du temps perdu about whether the p in the name of the character Saint-Loup is pronounced (one gathers that the actual bearer of the name just says it in the normal French way.) Various (non-aristocratic) people claim that the p is actually sounded, Because Aristocracy.
The “Bulleit” brand of what Y characterizes as “fancy hooch” (I wouldn’t say it’s really all that fancy) is standardly pronounced in AmEng homophonously with “bullet.” But on the internet you can find people complaining about other people who supposedly pronounce it in a pseudo-French way like “boo-yay” due to some combination of cluelessness and pretension. I can’t say that I’ve heard that myself.
ETA: The Tom Bulleit who founded the hooch brand in the late 1980’s claimed to be carrying on the tradition of his great-great-grandfather Augustus who had allegedly been a pioneer distiller in 19th-century Kentucky. This piece asserts that the mythologized vita of Augustus promoted by the multinational conglomerate that actually now owns the brand (Diageo) is inaccurate in any number of particulars but provides what the writer considers to be the minimal verifiable historical info about Augustus (pronunciation not known). https://chuckcowdery.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-real-augustus-bulleit-revealed.html
The t in Lot is pronounced both for the river and the biblical figure. The same applies to biblical names Japhet and Josaphat if I’m not mistaken.
I wondered if Hugo added the -h to his invented Jérimadeth to make sure the t would be pronounced, but then I realized it rhymes with demandait, so it’s just there for an exotic look.
PlasticPaddy says :The only definite thing I can find in this video is ….”
======
He pronounces mais ‘but’ with [ɵ] (rather than [ɛ]).
Guyana Creole and Kouri-Vini have mé ‘but’ ([me]). However his French is neither of them.
What caught my ear was the extra-close /e/, as in est and Doucet, and the affricated/palatalized /k/ of canadienne, at 0:29.
JWB, thanks! Historian Richard Bulliet writes in the comments to that post, “…like Tom Bulleit [maker of the bourbon] I am great, great grandson of Augustus Bulleit through his grandson Paul Constantine Bulleit. My grandfather changed the spelling of our name from Bulleit to Bulliet in 1913 and went on to become a prominent newspaper art critic in Chicago from the 1920s onward.”
The blog post itself says that Augustus was probably from Alsace-Lorraine. His surname was also spelled Boilliat or Boilleat. Although he may have distilled some whiskey, that has nothing to do with the modern-day product, except in the myth concocted by marketers.
What caught my ear was the extra-close /e/, as in est and Doucet, and the affricated/palatalized /k/ of canadienne, at 0:29.
French /k/ is commonly fronted in front of /a/, traditionally a front vowel, so much so that Koreans exposed to spoken French often hear /ka/ as 꺄 kkya instead of 카 ka which is the standard transcription. Likewise, they hear /ɡa/ as 갸 gya instead of 가 ga.
You can see this description in the page on French pronunciation on a popular Korean wiki site, for example.
I can’t watch the video today, but I can very much confirm that French /k/ is quite noticeably fronted next to front vowels including /a/*. It’s not a Russian/Greek-style [kʲ], but reasonably close. I’ve been transcribing it as [k̟] for years.
Another word whose letters are all pronounced is brut.
* And /a/ being a front vowel is true regardless of whether the accent in question has merged /ɑ/ into /a/.
I’ll be curious to know what you think of the video. It’s not a [k̟]. Actually he says it twice, in “québécoise, canadienne”. It sounds like a [ʨ].
@Vanya: McQueen has a lot of screen time in The Great Escape without any of the other stars around. Besides the riding,* there’s the stuff in the cooler. In The Magnificent Seven, McQueen antagonized some of the other stars, particularly the top billed Yul Brynner, by trying to steal their scenes. So when John Sturges cast McQueen (as well as Bronson and Coburn) again, in The Great Escape, McQueen was given a lot of solo material to avoid the problems recurring.
* He also played the Nazi the motorcycle was stolen from, doing the stunt where he dropped the bike. However, the jump was performed by famous stunt driver Bud Ekins, who also did some of the stunt driving in Bullitt.
Saint-Loup… Various (non-aristocratic) people claim that the p is actually sounded, Because Aristocracy.
This comes up in the narrator’s treatment of Mme de Cambremer (Legrandin’s sister, the plebeian wife of the Marquis de Cambremer, not the marquis’ mother), in Sodome et Gomorrhe :
Which reminds me, in relation to the discussion of -t in the thread above : le Fouquet’s [fukets].
Or [fukεts] rather. (I didn’t bother with the IPA ε.) I would like to know how this pronunciation got started.
I thought we’d had a discussion of learned French adjectives from proper names, like foucaldien from Foucault, but I can’t find it, so I guess this is as good a place as any to put my startlement at having just run across (on this page) coctalien from Cocteau.
Simple classicizing reverse-engineering, no more startling than montcellien from Montceau-les-Mines.
Someone must have used un cocktail coctalien somewhere 🙂
@DM:
In Spanish that’s a common pattern in demonyms (eg, vallisoletano < Valladolid, or in a more extreme firm, hidrocálido < Aguascalientes), but I don’t think I’ve seen it in eponyms. If I had to coin an adjective for ‘in the manner of Ortega y Gasset’, it would probably be orteguesco rather than urtiquesco
There’s already orteguiano. At least the DLE has that and doesn’t give any synonyms. But maybe that doesn’t mean “in the manner of”.
Having checked at behindthename.com, I see I misled one of my students when I told him or at least strongly implied that his surname came from ortega ‘Black-bellied Sandgrouse, Pterocles orientalis‘. The DLE says that ortega is of uncertain origin, and Wiktionary says nothing about the etymology.
Always start with Corominas. He says the place- and family name is a variant of ortiga ‘nettle’. The bird is an early learned borrowing from Latin ortyx < ὄρτυξ ‘quail’.
Spanish WAry says, inexplicably, that the surname is “Del vasco, junto a la piedra.”
Thanks, that’s interesting. I wonder the Royal Academy doesn’t accept it. Maybe there are other suggestions. But I’m glad to know where to find Corominas.