Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?
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The letter æ was used in Old English to represent the vowel that's pronounced in Modern English ash, fan, happy, and last: /æ/. Mostly we now spell that vowel with the letter a, because of the Great Vowel Shift.
When æ appears in writing Modern English, it's meant to be a typographic variant of ae, and is pronounced the same as that sequence of vowel letters would be. So Encyclopaedia or Encyclopædia, no difference.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3...Highly recommend the protracted arguments in the comments, that's a wonderfully pedantic StackExchange. Big shoutout to someone in 2012 defining "NLP" as an unusual word -- how the world has changed! It's only a matter of time before they open an AP/IB course in NLP...
The Great Vowel Shift indeed makes written English much more confusing than it perhaps should be. English is already a messy hodge-podge of a language, then our writing system started to get standardised (or standardized, if you're American!) right as pronunciation started to change, leading to the written version of words suddenly no longer being anything like the pronunciation.