French Derivatives in HP Character Names

[nplyon]

No: HPFGUIDX 40407

[In reference to the pronunciation of words in the book, Pam said:]

>(apart from Voldemort - for some obscure reason I was sure it was a 
> silent t but I can't imagine why on earth I thought that).  

I too thought it was a silent t, although I know why I thought so.  I 
majored in French in college and I assumed the t was silent because I 
was assigning French phonetic rules to the word.  What struck me the 
first time I read the series was that the name Voldemort has three 
distinct French elements in it.  It's obvious to me that JKR speaks 
at least some French, as the structure of the sentences one of the 
Beauxbatons students speaks during the QWC scene (pg. 123 in the US 
hardcover edition "Ou est Madame Maxime?  Nous l'avons perdue--") 
indicates that she did not simply pick up a French dictionary and 
find the French equivalents for the words she wanted to use (or maybe 
someone else wrote the sentences for her...but I digress).  Voldemort 
has three distinct parts to it: Vol- meaning theft or flight, de- 
meaning, roughly, of, and mort- meaning death.  So, in French, his 
name means something like "Theft of Death" or "Flight of Death".  The 
same is true for Draco's last name: mal- meaning bad, and foy- 
meaning faith, although mal is actually an adverb, not an adjective, 
and the letter y at the end of "foy" as opposed to the letter i at 
the end (foi) is a spelling device of old French.  So his name is 
Draco Badfaith. Lastly, Beauxbatons: beaux- meaning beautiful and 
batons- meaning stick, rod, wand.  I know that JKR uses a lot of 
Latin in her novels but my only familiarity with it is through my 
knowledge of French.  I'd be interested to read what anyone else 
might have to contribute to this thread.

~Nicole, who was delighted to learn French so that she could 
understand what was being said in books like Jane Eyre and, more 
recently, HP. :)