On Sat, 21 Feb 2004, David Silberstein wrote: #>Pronounced "ay", with the difference you'd expect before "r", and so #>obeying the rule. (Note that "they" would be spelled "thei" if we #>didn't have a strong prejudice against writing final "i" that has led #>us to write it "y" for centuries.) # #Quibble: *Are* they pronounced "ay"? To my ear (here we go with #pronunciation problems again), the sound is not the same as in #"weigh". Mon ami, reread what I wrote: 'Pronounced "ay", with the difference you'd expect before "r", and so obeying the rule.' That *is* the difference you're referring to. # http://dictionary.reference.com/ indicates that they are different; #"their" says "â" (a-carat) rather than "a-superscript-bar" (for #"weigh"). [circumflex, not caret, and certainly not carat] #The OED indicates different vowel sounds as well. Look at where those different vowel sounds are used. #> Deis. #>Where'd you get this one? The OED has it only as a spelling of "dais" #>used in the 13th to 16th centuries. #> # #Yup. I was using dictionary.reference.com for the above, feeling too #lazy to log into my OED access, and misspellings brought up some #various words with "ei" in, including the above obsolete one. #That's probably a cheat as well. Uh-huh. :-) -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel