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September 5

Lexemuel Ray Hesler

How is his name (and the surname) pronounced? Шурбур (talk) 07:58, 5 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Some educated guesswork:

"Lexemuel" looks like an anglicised Hebrew name ending in "el" meaning "God". It's not in the King James Bible, but googling throws up graves of 19th-century American Protestants, concentrated in Indiana. Maybe ask at Wikipedia:WikiProject Indiana. (Could it be from "Lex Emmanuel", dog Latin for "law of God"?) In Samuel, Emmanuel, and Lemuel, as ordinary personal names as opposed to in hymns, the usual English pronunciation of -uel is /ˈ—juːəl/ or /ˈ—juːl/; the latter by compression (like in "manual" or "gradual"). That would give /lɛksˈɛmjuː(ə)l/ or perhaps /ləksˈɛmjuː(ə)l/.
"Hesler" seems to be of German origin, so in anglicised German it would be /ˈhɛzlər/; but Larry Hesler is /ˈhɛslər/. More instances at Internet Archive TV News searching closed captions' texts for hesler; but trawling the records is tedious: I got one false match (hester) and two ambiguous pronunciations ([1] [2]) before giving up.