Questions about the ligatures Æ and Œ

Factual Questions
1

  1. The name of the ligature Æ is ash. It is also a pseudonym of Irish poet George Russell. How do you pronounce the pseudonym? Is is “ash”, “Ay-ee”, or “Aah”?

  2. Does the ligature Œ have a name of its own in English, other than “the oe ligature”?

2

This linkhttp://www.brl.org/formats/rule18.html calls the oe ligature ‘ethel’

3

I think the AE ligature is pronounced either like an ay-ee as you suggested, or just like a hard E, but I could be SO wrong on this.

4

The ae ligature is pronounced as if it were an e in the appropriate context. As in, anaesthetic, aerial, and encyclopaedia.

5

OE Merman
OE Alcohol
OE Mertz

6

TheOP asks how to pronounce the pseudonym

Since his AE signature was supposedly originally AEON, that would leave out ash. I vote for Ay-ee.

7

Aeon (or Æon), which is the British (but not Canadian) spelling of “eon”, is pronounced “eon”.

8

OK,

here’s what OED has to say about it:

ae

(usually written as a digraph or ligature, but also, and in the earliest times, separately ae) was in OE. the symbol of a simple vowel, intermediate between a and e. When short, as in glaed, faeder, it represented orig. Teut. short a, and had the power of modern End. a. in man, glad; when long, as in sae, flaesc, the same sound prolonged, as in a common American pronunciation of bear, hair, there. After 1100 the short ae was generally replaced by a (though sometimes by e); the long ae continued to be written ae in the 12th and early 13th c. … The symbol ae, which thus disappeared from the language in 13th c., was re-introduced in 16th c. in forms derived from Lating words with ae, and (this being the Latin symbolization of Greek ai) Greek words in ai; as aedify, aether. But this ae had only an etymological value, and whenever a word became thorough English, the ae was changed into simple e.

As for oe, the OED says that originally it was written separately, and in Early Old English it was the symbol of the i-umlaut o, which originally sounded like the German umlauted-o, which is basically similar to the the “oo” in “foot”, with lips rounded. It goes on to say that later this was simply pronounced as an “e.”

“in moden Eng. oe reproduces the usual L. spelling of Gr. oi, which often in med. L., and in Romanic, was treated like simple e.”