How do you pronounce "Gbagbo"?

[Smapti]

As in the soon-to-be-former president of Cote d’Ivoire.

I assume either the G or the B is silent.

[Sunspace]

I would pronounce it “guh-bah-guh-bow”, but that’s probably wrong.

[TruCelt]

Put your mouth in the “G” position, then say “bag-bo”. It comes out a sort of ee-bagbo, but not really. The “g” is not voiced, but it’s there to alter the onset of the “b”.

[even_sven]

Yeah, the “G” has an effect, but it’s a little hard to explain. It comes out as a bit of a catch or hum in the throat that makes the “B” come out a little stronger.

[ultrafilter]

Is there a recording of someone pronouncing it?

[clairobscur]

Here’s a link to an interview of Gbagbo . The journalist pronounces his name at the very beginning.

[clairobscur]

Better : in this video the name is pronounced by the Ivorian politician interviewed several times : at 0:45 1:39 2:37 3:03 3:15

[Wendell_Wagner]

I think the simplest explanation for an English-speaker who doesn’t want to be forced to learn a new phoneme that they’ve never used before is to pronounce it as /bag-bow/. The phonemes written here as /b/ aren’t really the same sound as the English /b/, but it would take a fair amount of listening and trying to imitate the sound to be able to consistently distinguish the two sounds.

[waterj2]

According to the Language Log blog:

The Eastern Kru languages generally have only open syllables — vowel, consonant + vowel, or consonant + /r/ + vowel. However, like many languages in Africa and a few languages elsewhere, their inventory of consonants includes doubly-articulated labio-velar stops, generally written in IPA as /k͡p/ or /ɡ͡b/, where the tie over the top of the two consonants indicates that this is a doubly-articulated consonant, not a cluster. For English speakers, one way to think of these sounds is to start from English /kw/ and /gw/, which in generally are also phonetically doubly-articulated labio-velars, in that the lip-rounding for the /w/ starts from the beginning of the /k/ or /g/, and is released synchonously with the velar occlusion. To turn this into /k͡p/ or / ɡ͡b/, just make the labial part a complete closure rather than the partial closure of /w/.

They say that simply omitting the initial /g/ is the most common pronunciation in English-speaking media.

[BigT]

@clairobscur

Better : in this video the name is pronounced by the Ivorian politician interviewed several times : at 0:45 1:39 2:37 3:03 3:15

It sounds like, if the previous word ends in a vowel sounds, the first G is combined with that syllable. It would be like saying “Talk to Gbagbo” as “tok toog bog bo” [tɒk tug bɒg bo].

[Itself]

My guess is that /gb/ is supposed to represent the co-articulated stop mentioned in waterj2’s post, as described here. (In fact, the first example there is from an Ivory Coast language, though I don’t know if that’s where the politician’s name comes from.)

[pulykamell]

@BigT

It sounds like, if the previous word ends in a vowel sounds, the first G is combined with that syllable. It would be like saying “Talk to Gbagbo” as “tok toog bog bo” [tɒk tug bɒg bo].

That’s not what it sounds like to me, at least not from the linked recordings. I think Itself and waterj2 have the right idea.

[Wendell_Wagner]

BigT writes:

> It sounds like, if the previous word ends in a vowel sounds, the first G is
> combined with that syllable. It would be like saying “Talk to Gbagbo” as “tok
> toog bog bo” [tɒk tug bɒg bo].

I presume that this combining sounds from previous words has nothing to do with the Ivory Coast language that the name “Gbagbo” comes from. It’s because the speakers in the clips are using French, which has a liaison rule, which does exactly that.