How does one pronounce words ending in “‑ae”?
I'm listing the English words ending with -ae and formed as the plural of a word in -a of Latin origin. I found in the New Oxford American Dictionary (by alphabetical order):
word American English British English
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algae -dʒi or -gaɪ -dʒiː or -giː
alumnae -mnaɪ or -mni -niː
amoebae -bi -biː
antennae -ni or -naɪ -niː
axillae -li or -laɪ -liː
ballistae -sti or -staɪ -stiː
branchiae -kii or -kaɪ -kiiː
bursae -si or -saɪ -siː
catenae -ni or -naɪ -niː
drachmae -mi or -maɪ -miː
exuviae -vii or -viaɪ -viiː
I stopped there, but it appears clear that:
- There is a rather general rule, i.e. most of them are pronounced either -i (rhymes with tea) or -aɪ (rhymes with cry).
- There is a US/UK difference, with British English favouring the -i form, ending in long i (same as tea, again).
- You can do no wrong if you go with the ending —i (short for US English, long for British English)
I'm going to post the pronunciation of the diphthong ae in Latin. It might differ from the actual pronunciation that is being adopted nowadays; this because it's inevitable that the mother tongue language influences the pronunciation of words coming from other languages (being recent or not).
There were different phases for the Latin language, although the ones that we are interested in are these ones. The expression names might be different, considering I translated them from the italian ones:
-
Classic pronunciation: Using this expression, we refer to the Latin pronunciation adopted by the upper class in the Ist century B.C.; the one of Cicero and Horatio. This pronunciation is based on the principle that assigns to each grapheme a single phoneme. In brief, for a single letter there is a single sound.
So, to make an example related to your question, the word Caesar is read ['kaesar]. -
Scholastic or Ecclesiastical pronunciation: After the year 1000, the first universities were born, and the lectures were done in Latin. This Latin differed a lot from the Latin of Horatio and Cicero. The scholars elaborated a new Latin, called Scholastic, that could express the abstract concepts full of undertones of the philosophy of that time, a philosophy that was called, precisely, Scholasticism.
This pronunciation is more difficult than the other and one of its features is the different pronunciation of the diphthong ae: Caesar would be ['tʃesar].