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The modern pronunciation with /f/ is a spelling pronunciation; the name in Old English was pronounced with , as shown in its Middle English descendant Alured (in which u stands for modern v).
Unfortunately for me my father had combined diplomacy with a study of Anglo-Saxon history and, of course with my mother's consent, he gave me the name of Alfred, one of his heroes ( I believe she had boggled at Aelfred ). This Christian name, for some inexplicable reason, had become corrupted in the eyes of our middle-class world; it belonged exclusively now to the working class and was usually abbreviated to Alf. Perhaps that was why Doctor Fisher, the inventor of Dentophil Bouquet, never called me anything but Jones, even after I married his daughter.
You give a kid a name like Cameron / or Alfred, or something like that, / and they end up wearing glasses / and looking at computers for the rest of their life.
^ Hall, Joseph Sargent (1942 March 2) “3. The Consonants”, in The Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain Speech (American Speech: Reprints and Monographs; 4), New York: King's Crown Press, →DOI, →ISBN, § 7, page 98.
Danskernes Navne, based on CPR data: 21 194 males with the given name Alfred have been registered in Denmark between about 1890 (=the population alive in 1967) and January 2005, with the frequency peak in the 1900s decade. Accessed on 19 June 2011.
Alfred is the 513th most common male given name in Finland, belonging to 389 male individuals (and as a middle name to 2,583 more, making it much more common as a middle name), according to February 2023 data from the Digital and Population Data Services Agency of Finland.
1862, Victor Hugo, chapter 2, in Les Misérables, Tome I : Fantine, book 4; republished as Isabel F. Hapgood, transl., 1887:
Il n’est pas rare aujourd’hui que le garçon bouvier se nomme Arthur, Alfred ou Alphonse, et que le vicomte — s’il y a encore des vicomtes — se nomme Thomas, Pierre ou Jacques. Ce déplacement qui met le nom « élégant » sur le plébéien et le nom campagnard sur l’aristocrate n’est autre chose qu’un remous d’égalité. L’irrésistible pénétration du souffle nouveau est là comme en tout.
It is not rare for the neatherd's boy nowadays to bear the name of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte--if there are still any vicomtes--to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This displacement, which places the "elegant" name on the plebeian and the rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality. The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there as everywhere else.