Antoni Dufriche-Desgenettes (1804 – December 19, 1878) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 merchant, ethnographer, poet, and linguist, known for the introduction of the notion of phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

. Being an autodidact in linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, he was not well received by his French colleagues, despite being a founding member of the Paris Linguistic Society, and has generally been considered to be a minor linguist. According to J.E. Joseph, his idea about phoneme survived primarily via its acceptance by Louis Havet

Louis Havet

Pierre Antoine Louis Havet was a French latinist and Hellenist, an expert an classical Greek and Latin poetry....

, from whom it was picked to be popularized by Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...

.

René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes

René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes

René-Nicolas Dufriche, baron Desgenettes was a French military doctor. He was chief doctor to the French army in Egypt and at Waterloo.-Early life:...

was his uncle.