I was just watching a video about Gustav Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower. And I noticed the narrator was pronouncing his name ee-fell rather than eye-full, which is the pronunciation I’ve always heard.
Is ee-fell the correct pronunciation in some contexts? Is that the way French speakers pronounce it? Or does the man’s name have a different pronunciation than the tower? Or was this just an error by the narrator (who is suspect might have been an AI)?
I think that the French pronounciation is more like ee-fell, but I’m no linguist.
On a related topic, in UK math classes Euler was always pronounced ‘you-ler’, but recently I hear him called something like ‘oiler’, which may be more authentic for the time?
I remember in HS French class the audio that we listened to pronounced it as in the OP, “eff-el.” Wiki agrees. But once a word crosses languages, all bets are off as to how it ends up–as we all well know. I’m guessing that diphthong probably isn’t native/common en Français.
FWIW, I’ve never heard anything other than the oiler pronunciation
To my poorly-trained ear for French pronunciation, I hear what you note, with the observation that the ‘eff’ part is pinched a bit, leaving it very with a very slight flavor of ‘iff’ in the mix.
Wikipedia has an audio pronunciation:
And if you think that’s difficult, just try to pronounce parmesan 
Just throwing in that Eiffel got his name from ancestors who came from the Eifel region in Germany, which is, in German, actually pronounced eye-fel (with the stress on the first syllable). The French pronunciation is different though.
Native French speaker here. The trick is simple. Just say those two letters back to back: la tour F L.
To my ears, this seems like a third pronunciation. So we have eye-ful, ee-fel, and eff-el.
In case my attempts at phonetic spelling aren’t clear; eye-ful is pronounced to rhyme with rifle, ee-fel is pronounced to rhyme with gleeful but with more of an eh than an uh in the second syllable, and eff-el is pronounced to rhyme with Ethel.
Can you link to the video? Are you sure he’s French (or even AI pretending to be French)?
Instead of mucking around with ambiguous phonetic spelling, did you see (or rather, hear) the audio pronunciation? File:Tour Eiffel Pronunciation.ogg - Wikipedia
Here’s another one from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRo4ZDZOplQ
For contrast, here’s the German pronunciation for the Eifel region that he’s named after: File:De-Eifel.ogg - Wikipedia
I was indeed unclear on your phonetic spelling. When I saw “eye-ful” I thought you meant it to rhyme with “sighful”, i.e. literally pronouncing the word “eye” there. Whereas I also rhyme it with “rifle”.
I think the only difference between eff-el as rhyming with Ethel and just saying the letters “F L” is the emphasis which would be on both syllables in the “F L” version but on the first syllable in the “eff-el” version. Then again, I’ve heard that French uses different rules for stress, which I am not completely familiar with.
In my dialect sighful and rifle rhyme perfectly. Were you thinking of “riffle”?
I also always have heard “oiler” as the pronunciation of Euler, but I’m American.
Correct. With the ‘eu’ pronounced as it is in Deutschland.
No, it’s ‘eu’ as in der Schweiz!
I pronounce the vowel in rifle the same as the one in sight, might, fight, etc. Whereas the one in “eye” is the same as the one in “sigh”.
Unfortunately, Wiktionary is not useful this time for translating into IPA, because according to Wiktionary, “eye” and “sigh” both have a “aɪ” sound in IPA, (so far so good), but sight, might, etc. also have an aɪ sound as their primary American vowel. A lot of those words that have a different vowel for me do have an alternative American vowel listed, but it’s not the same one for all of the words!
So I think my dialect has a fight-eye split if that’s a thing but I can’t pinpoint the IPA code for it. The vowel for fight is formed more toward the back of my mouth than “eye” is.
All those words have the exact same vowel sound in my (American) dialect. E.g. sigh and sight are absolutely identical vowel sounds except then you tack a distinctly separate “t” sound on the end of one of them.
No, I don’t think the narrator is French. He seems to have an American accent otherwise.
There was a time when I was very confused by the fact that the two mathematicians Euler and Euclid start with completely different vowel sounds.
I’m quite confused by what you think is the difference between the vowel in “sigh” and “sight”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, they are identical in American English, and are also identical in British English (although not the same between those two dialects). It says that in American English, they are /saɪ/ and /saɪt/ respectively, while in British English they are /sʌɪ/ and /sʌɪt/ respectively. When you mention a “fight-eye” split, is that something you’ve read about or did you just invent that to explain the difference in your idiolect? I can find no reference to such a split.
I’m confused as to what you thought I meant when I said that I do not know if it is a thing or not.
The only place I can find an audio of a minimal difference is in the wiktionary page for wight. Also confusingly, it only has the aɪ pronunciation listed, but has two samples of American english saying “wight”. The second sample is what I pronounce it like. But the wiktionary entry does not say what the IPA for that sound is.
We’ve had a number of threads about pronunciation and the variations between dialects along with individual differences about sounds.
I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone claim a difference between sigh and sight. When I pronounce them very carefully to discern a difference, I do indeed hear a distinction between the “i” sounds, the first being higher. I don’t read IPA, sadly, so I don’t know if that conforms. But I would never have noticed a difference in ordinary speech, and I have always considered them the same.