How is "æ" supposed to be pronounced?

The Encyclopædia Brittanica still uses the symbol "æ". However, I still hear everyone pronounce it as "Encyclo pee dia", when their spelling suggests more along the lines of "Encyclo pah dia" or "encyclo pay dia". In a more general sense, should æ or Æ always be pronounced as a long e sound? When I see it used, it is in dæmon, æther, or æon.

The wikipedia page makes it clear that they should be pronounced with another sound along the lines of ah or eh... confusing because I want to pronounce it as "ai" or "ay". Given the name "Aion" as a recent videogame, and the common pronunciation of a CS mailer-daemon as "Daymon", clearly others behave the same way.

The problem lies in that æ used to be pronounced as ah/eh, and now seems to be pronounced as ay. Encyclopædia is the only exception... being pronounced as ee?

How do I pronounce it when seen in English? ee, ay, or ah/eh?

Solution 1:

You have to distinguish English vowels from English orthography. There are between twelve and fifteen distinct vowels in English, depending on your dialect, but there are only 5 vowel letters in the orthography. This causes no end of problems.

The letter æ was used in Old English to represent the vowel that's pronounced in Modern English ash, fan, happy, and last: /æ/. Mostly we now spell that vowel with the letter a, because of the Great Vowel Shift.

When æ appears in writing Modern English, it's meant to be a typographic variant of ae, and is pronounced the same as that sequence of vowel letters would be. So Encyclopaedia or Encyclopædia, no difference.

Solution 2:

English orthography is rule based...except it's not very good at following the rules. Sometimes it uses a regular literal one-to-one pronunciation, at oher times the spelling got stuck centuries ago but sounds changes occurred in speech, and sometimes, the word is written as from the foreign language it was borrowed from but the impossible or unlikely pronunciation is adapted to English mouths and ears.

The pair 'ae' or the single mushed together symbol 'æ', is not pronounced as two separate vowels. It comes (almost always) from a borrowing from Latin. In the original Latin it is pronounced as /ai/ (in IPA) or to rhyme with the word 'eye'. But, for whatever reason, it is usually pronounced as '/iy/' or "ee". Encyclodpeeedia, alumneee (for many female 'alumnae'). Another variant is /ɛ/ in an-eh-sthetic for 'anaesthetic'. Note that many of these spellings are now variants and the more common spelling removes the strange looking 'a'.

Another pair borrowed from Latin is 'oe' is in (the old fashioned spelling) 'oesophagus' where it is pronounced /ɛ/ 'eh' eh-sah-fuh-gus.

Solution 3:

You may be mixing up the IPA pronunciation symbol æ and the alphabetic letter æ.

In English text, the letter is used as a slightly old-fashioned form of the Latin digraph ae (also in Latin-mediated Greek words) and in some names from Danish, Norwegian, Old English and a few other languages that use the letter natively.

The pronunciation doesn't have to be anything like the IPA [æ].

For Latin loanwords in ordinary English text, it's essentially equivalent to the letter "e" (so always "encyclopEEdia", "julius cEEsar") but in the study of Latin language and culture it's common to pronounce names and terms in ways more similar to how the original speakers did.

In Danish (etc.) names, you'd adapt to what ever approach you would otherwise use for those names in English text. It may end up actually sounding like the IPA [æ].