Antoni Dufriche-Desgenettes (26 February 1804, Paris – 19 December 1878, Saint-Mandé), baptized Antoine Marie Dufriche-Foulaines, was a French seafaring merchant, poet and amateur phonetician.
His father François Nicolas, a brother of René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes, had changed his family name from Dufriche-Desgenettes to Foulaines-Dufriche[1] and was a lawyer and political writer; Antoni's mother Antoinette Elisabeth Vassault-Vareille was a translator from English and a publisher-bookseller.
His travels enabled him to collect information about the sounds of many languages and to develop a universal phonetic alphabet.
As an autodidact in linguistics, he remained something of an outsider, however, and it is likely that the term phoneme survived primarily thanks to its acceptance by Louis Havet,[4] although it underwent a number of metamorphoses in the course of half a century until it finally acquired the meaning 'smallest distinctive unit'.
[7][8] A biographical sketch of Dufriche was compiled by E. F. K. Koerner in 1976,[9] but his date of death[4] and his full first name[2] long remained a mystery.