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How is Æ pronounced at the beginning of a word? Or is that simply a play on the confusion of "Æ" pronunciation? The most prominent example is the Tool album entitled "Ænima?"

Randal
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  • Every use of the digraph in these explanations has been demonstrated within the words used to describe its correct pronunciation. – Randal Jun 12 '17 at 19:49
  • https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-æ-supposed-to-be-pronounced – Davo Jun 12 '17 at 20:01
  • Wikipedia has a linkt to http://toolshed.down.net/faq/faq.html which describes the pronunciation of "Ænima" (it's "ON-ima" apparently). As StoneyB says, there is no rule. – herisson Jun 12 '17 at 20:46
  • Thanks, everyone. I have always pronounced it as "ON-ima" myself. Thank you, StoneyB, For helping me clear that up. I now am certain that Æ is prnounced similarly to most other letters or words in that it all depends on the accent. The ways humans communicate is constantly evolving and to my understanding ti t'nseod rettam woh gnihtyna si delleps ro decnuonorp as long as the meaning is understood between the parties communicating :) – Randal Jun 14 '17 at 16:47

1 Answers1

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The ‹Æ› ligature doesn't represent any particular sound. Its primary uses in English are to represent

  • the Latin diphthong spelled ‹ae›, whose pronunciation depends on where you learned your Latin, and from whom (I was taught /ai/ in the US and /e:/ in Austria; I believe many English Latinists prefer /i:/.)

  • the Old English character ‹æ›, generally believed to have been pronounced like the IPA character with the same form

The use of Æ in Ænima is consistent with this inconsistency: according to Wikipedia it's a typographic pun confounding anima and enema.

StoneyB on hiatus
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  • To expand on your first bullet point a bit, is pronounced various ways because of the long history of pronunciations for Latin. It corresponds to Old Latin , which was almost certainly something like [aj], [ai] or [aɪ]; however, this ended up changing to the monophthong [ɛː] eventually, and the use of the spelling in the Classical period suggests that an intermediate step in this change was a lowering of the final element to something like [e], so for Classical Latin it may be more accurate to transcribe it as [ae]. – herisson Jun 12 '17 at 20:51
  • ...However, English users of "restored" Latin pronunciation generally ignore this phonetic subtlety, since most accents of English don't have [ae] in their phonetic inventory, and few people spend much effort on acquiring a perfect accent in a foreign language that they don't use on a daily basis. This causes many English Latin students to simply think of Latin as the exact same sound as the English /aɪ/ phoneme found in words like "dye" (and indeed, there is probably overlap considering the range of Latin and English accents, and the range that naturally exists for all phonemes). – herisson Jun 12 '17 at 20:53
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    @sumelic I imagine something similar is involved in the Austrian and 'English' pronunciations: the Austrian /e:/ is consistent with both ecclesiastical Latin and German ‹ae›/‹ä›, and the 'English' is /e:/ shifted great-vowelly. – StoneyB on hiatus Jun 12 '17 at 21:00
  • The use of Æ here may be consistent with the inconsistency, but the pronunciation is inconsistent even with its own inconsistency: this appears to be the only words in the English language where ⟨æ⟩ represents /ɒ/! – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 12 '17 at 21:11
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: Or /ɑː/, perhaps. I just edited the Wikipedia article to remove the diaphonemic IPA transcription with /ɒ/ because I find it easy to imagine that whoever wrote the Tool FAQ had the father-bother merger and wasn't particularly thinking of British pronunciation when writing "ON-ima". The band seems to come from California, and the pronunciation seems to be based on "Anima", which has no obvious reason to be prononunced with /ɒ/ rather than /ɑː/ in accents that don't merge these phonemes. – herisson Jun 12 '17 at 21:49
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    @sumelic From the horse's mouth: the band's guitarist, in this interview from 1996 when the album was released, was asked about the pronunciation and gave the first syllable as /ɑː/--with perhaps just a tinge of [ɒ:]. – StoneyB on hiatus Jun 12 '17 at 22:36