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e. Old English ( Englisċ or Ænglisc, pronounced [ˈeŋɡliʃ] ), or Anglo-Saxon, [ 1] was the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old ...
ae is used in Irish for /eː/ between two "broad" consonants, e.g. Gael /ɡeːlˠ/ "a Gael". In Latin, ae originally represented the diphthong /ae/, before it was monophthongized in the Vulgar Latin period to /ɛ/; in medieval manuscripts, the digraph was frequently replaced by the ligature æ .
Æ ( lowercase: æ) is a character formed from the letters a and e, originally a ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae. It has been promoted to the status of a letter in some languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä.
Other words have a stronger Latin feel to them, usually because of spelling features such as the digraphs ae and oe (occasionally written as ligatures: æ and œ, respectively), which both denote /iː/ in English. The digraph ae or ligature æ in some words tend to be given an /aɪ/ pronunciation, for example, curriculum vitae.
In the romanization of Nanjing Mandarin, Ä stands for [ɛ] . The sign at the bus station of the Finnish town Mynämäki, illustrating an artistic variation of the letter Ä. In the Nordic countries, the vowel sound [æ] was originally written as "Æ" when Christianisation caused the former Vikings to start using the Latin alphabet around A.D ...
There is no reduction of Latin -ae plurals (e.g., larvae); nor where the digraph <ae>/<oe> does not result from the Greek-style ligature as, for example, in maelstrom or toe; the same is true for the British form aeroplane (compare other aero-words such as aerosol).
In Welsh, the digraph ll fused for a time into a ligature.. A digraph (from Ancient Greek δίς (dís) 'double' and γράφω (gráphō) 'to write') or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
Nowadays, the ligatures have been generally replaced by the digraphs ae and oe (encyclopaedia, diarrhoea) in British English or just e (encyclopedia, diarrhea) in American English, though both spell some words with only e (economy, ecology) and others with ae and oe (paean, amoeba, oedipal, Caesar).