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From: rwt@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Rainer Thonnes)
Subject: Re: ae (was: Sociological autopsy of the Dunblane massacre)
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References: <31c8ba59.28879345@news.Leiden.NL.net>  <9606202253105327@election.demon.co.uk> <N4N7QQAIYhyxEw+Z@vision25.demon.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 1996 13:25:19 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <N4N7QQAIYhyxEw+Z@vision25.demon.co.uk>,
Cheradenine Zakalwe <zakalwe@vision25.demon.co.uk> writes:
> In article <9606202253105327@election.demon.co.uk>, David Boothroyd
> <david@election.demon.co.uk> writes:
> >
> > The word paedophile comes from the latin, and the
> >prefix paedo- means of or relating to children. American simplified 
> >spelling has eliminated 'ae' (which should be joined together like
> >this  - your computer may not have this character).
> 
> Is this right? My understanding is that Latin "ae" was pronounced as in
> English "eye",

Truth be told, we don't know much about how the Romans pronounced things.
In our times, Latin is pronounced wildly differently depending on whether
you learn it in an English-speaking environment or, say, a German-speaking
one.  Fashions and opinions differ, for example, on whether the nominative
plural of alumna, viz alumnae, should be pronounced ending in -knee, -neigh
(-nay), or -nigh (-neye) in the English-speaking world.  Germans would
pronounce the "ae" exactly as they would any normal occurrence of "ae" in
German, that is to say the same as an a-umlaut, which is a bit like the
non-rhotic pronunciation of "air" used in some parts of England.

My COD of English Etymology shows paedo- as deriving from Greek pais, paid-,
which would support the theory of the "ae" being a juxtaposition rather
than a mixture of sounds, and that the evolution to the modern English
"peedo" sound does not preclude an earlier English "pie-dough" sound.

Although the same dictionary admits to the existence of the alternative
"pedo-" spelling, this development is an unfortunate one since it removes
a useful distinction.  Clearly a pedophile is a person with a particular
interest in, or indeed fetish for, feet.  Hence, a doctor specialising
in children is a paediatriacian (like pedophile, often unsatisfactorily
spelled pediatrician), but not many people know this.  In a social context
you might be introduced to somebody and told she's a doctor, and on finding
out that she's a paediatrician, deduce that she specialises in feet.
Unfortunately, a foot specialist is a podiatrist, I'm told.
