Æ

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This article is about the Latin-script ligature. For the Cyrillic letter, see Ӕ (Cyrillic). For the sound, see Near-open front unrounded vowel. For other uses, see AE (disambiguation).

Æ
Æ æ
Latin language
Phonetic usage[æ, a, i, ɛ, e]
History
Development
AE ae
  • Æ æ
Other
Writing directionLeft-to-Right
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
Æ in Helvetica and Bodoni
Æ alone and in context

Æ (

Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä. The modern International Phonetic Alphabet uses it to represent the near-open front unrounded vowel (the sound represented by the 'a' in English words like cat). Diacritic variants include Ǣ/ǣ, Ǽ/ǽ, Æ̀/æ̀, Æ̂/æ̂ and Æ̃/æ̃.[a]

As a letter of the

Old English
: æsċ) if the ligature is included.

Air Melanesiæ
in the 1970s.
Katholische Hofkirche in Dresden
(at the beginning of "ÆDEM")

Languages

Latin

In

Latin for "tailed e"). That was further simplified into a plain e, which may have influenced or been influenced by the pronunciation change. However, the ligature is still relatively common in liturgical books
and musical scores.

French

In the modern

tænia, and the first name Lætitia.[3] It is mentioned in the name of Serge Gainsbourg's song Elaeudanla Téïtéïa, a reading of the French spelling of the name Lætitia: "L, A, E dans l'A, T, I, T, I, A."[4]

English

The name Ælfgyva, on the Bayeux Tapestry

In

ae
is often used instead.

In the United States, the issue of the ligature is sidestepped in many cases by use of a simplified spelling with "e", as happened with œ as well. Usage, however, may vary; for example, medieval is now more common than mediaeval (and the now old-fashioned mediæval) even in the United Kingdom,[5] but archaeology is preferred over archeology, even in the US.[6]

Given their long history, ligatures are sometimes used to show archaism or in literal quotations of historic sources; for instance, in those contexts, words such as dæmon and æther are often so spelled.

The ligature is seen on gravestones of the 19th century, short for ætate ("at the age (of)"): "Æ xxYs, yyMs, zzDs." It is also common[

better source needed
] well into the 21st century.

In

an abbreviation for "bronze",[8] derived from the Latin aes (aere in the ablative
, "from bronze").

In Old English, æ represented a sound between a and e (/æ/), very much like the short a of cat in many dialects of Modern English. If long vowels are distinguished from short vowels, the long version /æː/ is marked with a macron (ǣ) or, less commonly, an acute (ǽ).

Other Germanic languages

In Old Norse, æ represents the long vowel /ɛː/. The short version of the same vowel, /ɛ/, if it is distinguished from /e/, is written as ę.

In most varieties of

Faroese
, æ is pronounced as follows:

  • [ɛa] when simultaneously stressed and occurring either word-finally, before a vowel letter, before a single consonant letter, or before the consonant-letter groups kl, kr, pl, pr, tr, kj, tj, sj, and those consisting of ð and one other consonant letter, except for ðr when pronounced like gr (except as below)
  • a rather open [eː] when directly followed by the sound [a], as in ræðast (silent ð) and frægari (silent g)
  • [a] in all other cases

One of its etymological origins is Old Norse é (the other is Old Norse æ), which is particularly evident in the dialects of Suðuroy, where Æ is [eː] or [ɛ]:

In Icelandic, æ represents the diphthong [ai], which can be long or short.

In

Norwegian, æ is a separate letter of the alphabet that represents a monophthong. It follows z and precedes ø and å
. In Norwegian, there are four ways of pronouncing the letter:

definite article
. Additionally, the northernmost and southernmost of that area use Æ as the first person singular pronoun I. The two words are different vowels.

In many northern, western, and southwestern Norwegian dialects such as Trøndersk and in the western Danish dialects of Thy and Southern Jutland, the word "I" (Standard Danish: jeg, Norwegian: jeg) is pronounced /æː/.[9] Thus, when this word is written as it is pronounced in these dialects (rather than the standard), it is often spelled with the letter "æ".

In western and southern

definite article: æ hus (the house), as opposed to Standard Danish and all other Nordic varieties which have enclitic
definite articles (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian: huset; Icelandic, Faroese: húsið [the house]).

The equivalent letter in German, Swedish, and Finnish is ä, but it is not located at the same place within the alphabet. In German, it is not a separate letter from "A" but in Swedish and Finnish, it is the second-to-last letter (between å and ö).

In the normalized spelling of Middle High German, æ represents a long vowel [ɛː]. The actual spelling in the manuscripts varies, however.

Ossetic

Ossetic Latin script; part of a page from a book published in 1935

schwa
).

South American languages

The letter æ is used in the official orthography of

Yaghan
.

International Phonetic Alphabet

The symbol [æ] is also used in the

lowercase. U+10783 𐞃 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL AE is a superscript IPA letter.[10]

The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) uses four additional æ-related symbols, see Unicode table below.[11]

Cyrillic

Main article:
Ae (Cyrillic)

The Latin letters are frequently used in place of the Cyrillic

Cyrillic
texts (such as on Ossetian sites on the Internet).

Typing the character

Nordic keyboard with keys for Æ and Ø. The Danish layout uses the blue labels and the Norwegian layout the green ones. (The white labels are for Swedish and Finnish, which use Ä and Ö.)
US-International
keyboard.
  • The HTML entities are Æ and æ
  • Windows: Alt+0198 or Alt+146 for uppercase, Alt+0230 or Alt+145 for lowercase.
  • In the TeX typesetting system, ӕ is produced by \ae.
  • Microsoft Word: Ctrl+⇧ Shift+& followed by A or a.
  • X: Composeae and ComposeAE can be used.
  • In all versions of the Mac OS (Systems 1 through 7, Mac OS 8 and 9, OS X, macOS 11, 12, 13, and the current macOS 14): æ: ⌥ Option+' (apostrophe key), Æ: ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+'.
  • On the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, as well as phones running Google's Android OS or Windows Mobile OS and on the Kindle Touch and Paperwhite: hold down "A" until a small menu is displayed.
  • On
    US-International
    keyboards, Æ is accessible with AltGr+z (X sometimes uses AltGr+a.
  • The
    Þ and Ö
    ).
  • The Norwegian keyboard layout also has a separate key for Æ, rightmost of the letters, to the right of Ø and below Å.
  • In Vim the digraph is 'AE' for Æ and 'ae' for æ. (Press Ctrl-K in Insert mode.)

Unicode

  • U+00C6 Æ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE
  • U+00E6 æ LATIN SMALL LETTER AE
  • U+01E2 Ǣ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE WITH MACRON
  • U+01E3 ǣ LATIN SMALL LETTER AE WITH MACRON
  • U+01FC Ǽ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE WITH ACUTE
  • U+01FD ǽ LATIN SMALL LETTER AE WITH ACUTE
  • U+1D01 ᴁ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL AE (UPA)
  • U+1D02 ᴂ LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED AE (UPA)
  • U+1D2D ᴭ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL AE (UPA)
  • U+1D46 ᵆ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL TURNED AE (UPA)
  • U+1DD4 ◌ᷔ COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER AE
  • U+10783 𐞃 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL AE (IPA)

See also

Footnotes

Notes

  1. ^ More information may be found at their entries on Wiktionary ( ǣ, ᴂ, etc.), and on the appendix page there entitled Variations of ae.

References

  1. ^ Harrison, James A.; Baskervill, W. M., eds. (1885). "æsc". A Handy Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on Groschopp's Grein. A. S. Barnes. p. 11.
  2. ISBN 978-0-19-860199-9
    , p. 3
  3. ^ http://monsu.desiderio.free.fr/curiosites/ligat-ae.html
  4. ^ https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/video/i04233221/serge-gainsbourg-elaeudanla-teiteia
  5. ^ The spelling medieval is given priority in both Oxford and Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Accessed September 22, 2014.
  6. ^ Merriam-Webster Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Accessed September 22, 2014.
  7. ^ Online search, February 2021[permanent dead link]
  8. ISBN 9781912667352
    p. xxxv.
  9. ^ Albert, Daniel (2022-06-24). "Trøndersk: The Dialects of Middle Norway". Life in Norway. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  10. ^ Miller, Kirk; Ashby, Michael (2020-11-08). "L2/20-252R: Unicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), pulmonic" (PDF).
  11. ^ Everson, Michael; et al. (2002-03-20). "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS" (PDF).

Further reading

External links
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