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up vote 3 down vote favorite

It's the name of a French mathematician.

I would like to get an approximate pronunciation. (e.g. je t'aime~zh tam, or zhe tehm).

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What part of the name did you find hard to pronounce ? (out of sheer curiosity) – Romain VALERI Jul 6 '12 at 7:58
All of it actually. I heard the "in" in many French names become like "aN". Some say it as "kow shee", with ow as in low, others say it "koo shee". I'd probably say Louis as "loo wee". – FrenchNoob Jul 6 '12 at 8:01
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forvo – Boris Treukhov Jul 6 '12 at 9:16
@BorisTreukhov make it an answer, please :) – Evpok♦ Jul 6 '12 at 9:48
I think the forvo link clarifies it up. I believe the voice there was that of an actual person instead of a machine like in GoogleTrans. – FrenchNoob Jul 6 '12 at 13:02

4 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted 
Au

As in Au​stralia.

gus

With the famous non-English ü, close front rounded vowel [y].

tin

As French matin​, or teint.

Louis

As in Saint-Loui​s (Missouri), without pronouncing the final s.

Cau

As in co-op.

chy

As the english word she.

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1  
And I'd pronounce the o of Augustin and of Cauchy in the same way [o], while I think that co-op is more open. (As for [œ̃] and [ɛ̃] some accents don't make a difference between [o] and [ɔ]) – Un francophone Jul 6 '12 at 11:27
I agree, they're the same [o]. And I was really talking about the "co" part of co-op. – rdurand Jul 6 '12 at 11:58
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I insist:​ ​ un and in may not be the same sound, so your claim that in is pronounced like 1 is not true. – Evpok♦ Jul 11 '12 at 9:23
In this case, you pronounce in from tin exactly like you pronounce the number 1. In general, I agree that it may differ, but here it's absolutely the same sound. – rdurand Jul 11 '12 at 9:25
It's ɛ̃ like in lin or teint, not œ̃ like un (the number 1). Downvoted for as long as this is not corrected. – Stéphane Gimenez Jul 11 '12 at 10:12
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up vote 1 down vote

Google is your friend, or better say it's text-to-speech companion : http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=fr&q=Augustin-Louis%20Cauchy

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Thanks. I never thought Google translate's feature would be accurate enough. au gis tanN Lwi kooshi. – FrenchNoob Jul 6 '12 at 7:47
@FrenchNoob What in the world is this phonetic syntax ? I never saw that. – Romain VALERI Jul 6 '12 at 7:52
That's how I approximate Google translate's reading. au as in august. My Idiot's Guide to French would probably write lwee for Louis but I suppose the ee is shorter, so I write lwi. Works for me though. – FrenchNoob Jul 6 '12 at 7:57
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@FrenchNoob I find strange that you make a difference between au of Augustin and au of Chauchy. I do not, not even one of length. – Un francophone Jul 6 '12 at 8:01
@Un francophone So Google translate's pronunciation isn't accurate after all. I'm positive it pronounces the two au's differently. – FrenchNoob Jul 6 '12 at 8:06
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up vote 3 down vote

Since Boris can't be bothered to post his own answer: forvo has a sound sample.

Now if you don't have a sound card, if you can't play the sound or if you are reading this on paper, here's a description:

Wikipédia says [ogystɛ̃ lwi koʃi]. I guess it must be something like

oh-güs-tĩ loo-ee coh-shee

with two non-English sounds: ü, close front rounded vowel [y] and ĩ, the open mid front unrounded nasal vowel ɛ̃ (which has an interesting tutorial on Youtube). Keep in mind that ee is short in French, too.

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I'm confused with the co. Google translate says something like coo. – FrenchNoob Jul 6 '12 at 8:02
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It is like the o in sow. Or the Au in Augustin. – Evpok♦ Jul 6 '12 at 8:11
Evpok means "sow" as in the verb (what a farmer does in the spring), not the noun (female pig). – Samuel Lisi Jul 6 '12 at 12:45
@SamuelLisi Oh yeah, thanks. Thought it was obvious :) – Evpok♦ Jul 6 '12 at 13:17
@Evpok, it was obvious, but I had an Augustijn beer recently. – Samuel Lisi Jul 6 '12 at 23:18
up vote 5 down vote

For anglophones who need to pronounce foreign names while speaking English, I highly recommend the following website (written by a topologist colleague back when he was a radio announcer for a classical music station): http://www.pronunciationguide.info/

I emphasize "while speaking English" because, if you are speaking English, you need to approximate the real pronunciation of the name with English phonemes. If you pronounce "Louis-Augustin Cauchy" absolutely correctly in English, a fair number of English speakers will only hear the foreignness of the sounds, and not the actual sounds themselves. (More extreme examples of this difficulty come from Chinese or Slavic names.)

Similarly, if you are speaking French, you will need to approximate English names with French phonemes. There is a possible exception if you are in an area like Montreal where a lot of franglais is spoken, but a fair number of bilingual French (or bilingual Americans) are at least occasionally confused by mixing phonemes from the two languages they speak in the same sentence.

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