[bbor]

Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't." Thanks for the interesting tidbit!

  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.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3...

Highly recommend the protracted arguments in the comments, that's a wonderfully pedantic StackExchange. Big shoutout to someone in 2012 defining "NLP" as an unusual word -- how the world has changed! It's only a matter of time before they open an AP/IB course in NLP...

[saltcured]

Hmm, I'm a Californian and I pronounce daemon as demon, understanding the first vowel as the same vowel as for Aesop. Indistinguishable from the vowel in "beam" and "niece".

But I pronounce the first vowel in aesthetic differently. For me, it's somewhat in between the vowels in "bed" and "bad" but closer to the former.

[bbor]

…TIL how to pronounce “Aesop”! Thanks for saving me eventual embarrassment - now I know why other people don’t mix up Aesop Rock and ASAP Rocky!

As a fellow Californian, I’d say we have authority anyway - I was taught in school that Ohio has the least specialized dialect, but that’s based on newscasters and such. The 21st century is the Californian century!

…that is, assuming Brussels’ English is out of the running, I suppose ;)

[jamesog]

"Aesthetic" gets even stickier! In the UK I tend to more commonly hear it pronounced as "es-thetic".

The Great Vowel Shift indeed makes written English much more confusing than it perhaps should be. English is already a messy hodge-podge of a language, then our writing system started to get standardised (or standardized, if you're American!) right as pronunciation started to change, leading to the written version of words suddenly no longer being anything like the pronunciation.

[int_19h]

The letter "æ" as used in Old English does indeed correspond to /æ/, but we don't use that letter (or even digraph) for this purpose anymore. In all the words where it is still occasionally used, it corresponds not to Old English "æ", but to Latin "ae", which is [ae̯].

[foobarian]

Oh I get it so it's like ä!