Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?

It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)

Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't." Thanks for the interesting tidbit!

  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...

Hmm, I'm a Californian and I pronounce daemon as demon, understanding the first vowel as the same vowel as for Aesop. Indistinguishable from the vowel in "beam" and "niece".

But I pronounce the first vowel in aesthetic differently. For me, it's somewhat in between the vowels in "bed" and "bad" but closer to the former.