How should one spell the sound "eye" when creating a word?

Question

How can I invent a word (or name) containing the sound "ai" (sounds like "eye") so that an English-speaker is likely to guess the correct pronunciation based on spelling alone, with no outside prompting?

For instance, if I wanted to create a spelling for a word to be pronounced like "eye's eye", how should I do this?

I've found partial solutions, but I find the limitations unacceptable.

Words like "pie", "ice", and "life" use a mechanism which only functions correctly near the end of a word. Worse, it sometimes fails entirely in longer words ("malice", "solstice", "hospice", "granite"). Trying to construct a spelling for my example word, we might come up with "Iezie" or "Izeie". These spellings seem to convey ambiguous pronunciation.

Words like "highlight" and "flight" provide something consistent, but this leads to awkward spellings. Consider "Ighzigh". A reader has some chance of settling on the correct pronunciation, but only after a period of mouthing nonsense while staring confused at that distracting Lovecraftian thing.

Words like "psychology" and "rely" require their pronunciation to be memorized. Otherwise, we might have a lot more fun pronouncing "physics". "Yzy" may look nice, but I would initially pronounce it like "easy", and do so with confidence.

I've also considered using "ai" to convey this, but it appears to function as I desire only when it ends a word. "Aizai" has a decent appearance, but it seems to suggest an English pronunciation like "A's eye".

And finally, "island", "wild", "rival", "chiral", and "chitin" appear to provide no guidance at all, and probably need to be memorized by rote. Each of these words is fun to say and looks good on a page, but only after some research.

Is there a compact, aesthetically-appealing solution?

Answer 1

Looking at Wikipedia, we see that a variety of pronunciation respellings have been used in English, but this sound has no consistent representation.

Following English conventions, the sound is usually represented as -ye or -ie, or eye when it is a syllable on its own. However, these representations only really work when syllables are separated by something like a hyphen. So, "eye-zye". Although this is fairly effective at indicating the pronunciation of the term, it is probably not what you want.

However, another common representation that many English speakers are familiar with is "ai", as you note; it occurs in Spanish and the romanization of Japanese, two writing systems that English speakers are likely to be familiar with. This is ambiguous with the /eɪ/ pronunciation of ai in ordinary English words, but the English digraph ai does not occur at the end of words, while it does occur in Japanese loanwords like samurai. Therefore, I'd think most English speakers would associate this spelling with the pronunciation you desire when it's at the end of a word.

If people can tell that your writing system for words like this is consistent, they will then be able to infer that ai represents the sound of "eye" in other positions as well. The spelling "aizai" will then be relatively unambiguous.

Answer 2

The old 50s rules for US English pronunciation hold that an "open" (vs "closed") syllable yields a "long" vowel sound. A long I is pronounced "eye", and a short I is pronounced (roughly) "ih".

An open syllable is one that ends with the vowel, or one that ends with a consonant and the letter "E".

Even though these rules are (apparently) no longer taught, they are somewhat intuitive, so there's a good chance that they will be followed.

Answer 3

To make models of lie, die, pie is a very bad idea, because those spellings are exceptional, part of padding short ordinary words to at least three letters, as also ebb, inn, lye, dye, lest they be as short as special words in, by, do, if, … (and go is exception to exception—isn't English spelling great?). The usual spelling for that sound at that point is as in spy, reply, … (which, sigh, is changed to ie when s or d is added). It is better to consider field or sweetie models for ie. In your case, in spite of ready, …, I would use y, although, as you said, only igh is consistent.

The actual long-short spelling rule applys (!) only to some words, generally not to foreign ones, although there are native exceptions, too (linen): When one of the five vowel letters is followed by one consonant letter, and maybe l or r, and a vowel letter or y, then the first vowel letter stands for a long vowel (diphthong). If one of the five vowel letters is followed by a consonant cluster other than final nd or ld, or the vowel-letter-following consonant is final, the vowel letter stands for a short vowel (monophthong). This leaves out many cases: liable, briar (the a probably because ie is a digraph), alkali, the three-letter exceptions, oboe, potatoes, …. In general, in longer words, when final e is silent, a is schwa, o and i are long (but nowadays, mostly in invented names, there are many cases where final i is like ie), and u is found only in newish words (there is a completely arbitrary spelling rule that neither v nor u is final) and usually pronounced not long-u, but oo.

Answer 4

I think it's a fairly hopeless cause. It's not a fault of English - it's a feature! You might be trying for something too clever. Perhaps it's worth asking whether your really need your word to be pronounced consistently? As long as it's not rude or something.