Re: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful)

On Tue, 2002-04-30 at 21:06, Christian Thalmann wrote:
> English |ai ay ey| --> /ej/,
That would be well and good except for the fact that most instances of
<ai> and <ay> in English to my knowledge originate from the Middle
English orthographical tradition of writing /a:/ as <ai> (-<y> at EOW,
of course). <ey> was used to write /e:/, now often /ej/ from French
borrowings (hence it can also represent /i:/ in cases where it was
affected by the Great Vowel Shift).

I don't believe English has even had an /ai/ or /ei/ other than in
modern times (when they're still separate) to have merged.

Tristan