Ay-men

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Usbek_de_Perse said:
I never quite get this. Why do Catholics say AY-MEN, instead of Ah-MEN?

The Catholic Church has a rich intellectual tradition that includes the study of languages such as Hebrew, Greek and Latin (among others). What gives?

Sorry, but when I hear AY-MEN, I think of backwoods camp meetings.

Thoughts?
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Who cares about the sounds?
and in 2000 years time?
 
I’ve moved around quite a bit so there’s no telling what local variation will escape my lips at any moment. So I probably use both AHmen and AYmen interchangeably, but I think I tend to use AYmen more when speaking the word, and AHmen when singing it. Does *anyone * sing it as AYmen? That seems bizarre.
 
I believe that the AY-men used in the US derives from the Irish pronunciation, since the majority of English-speaking Catholics were at one time Irish. As far as ho-saa-na versus ho-sah-na, the ho-saa-na pronunciation seems to be common among low church Protestants and Evangelicals. I have never heard Catholics or Anglicans in America say anything but the AH version, with one exception: that dreadful “Lilies of the Field” (Jester Harrison) tune sometimes used as a Great Amen. Show tunes have no place at Mass.
 
I’m sure there are some “contemporary” Catholic Mass parts that were composed as late as 1985 that use “Ay-men”. There are probably some later non-Mass part songs that use that pronunciation too. But even contemporary songs like to use “Ah-men” because “Aaaayyyyy” is generally a vowel sound to avoid regardless of whatever word one is singing.
 
SMHW said:
I’m sure there are some “contemporary” Catholic Mass parts that were composed as late as 1985 that use “Ay-men”. There are probably some later non-Mass part songs that use that pronunciation too. But even contemporary songs like to use “Ah-men” because “Aaaayyyyy” is generally a vowel sound to avoid regardless of whatever word one is singing.
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Let’s not bring The Fonz into this please.
 
I have always said ah-men because I am English whereas any Irish I have ever known (Catholics) say ay-men.

Just like we English say far-ther and the Irish say fa-ther.

I hope I wrote that right.

I haven’t heard someone say ay-men for a long time.
 
At my home parish and all Catholic parishes that I’ve ever been in have always said “Ay-men”; however, whenever we sing the “Amen” it’s always “AH-men”, not ever “Ay-men.” One time when we had Mass at a special function and the priest was unaccompanied, he used a version of the Amen that said “Ay-men.”

It went something like this: “Ay-men, Ay-men; to the Father, to the Son, Ay-men, to the Holy Spirit, Ay-men.” It was dreadful to listen to.
 
South of the Mason-Dixon line I only heard Ah-men in singing, Spoken, the word is Ay-men. 🤷
 
nonsumd said:
For what it’s worth, this is what Wikipedia says about the matter:
Fowler, in his Modern English Usage (2nd ed., s.v. ‘amen’), quotes from Essays and Studies (1960), “Ay-men is probably a comparatively modern Anglican invention of about a hundred years’ standing. Roman Catholics, one is glad to note, on the whole retain the English āmen.”
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This confuses me: I was always taught that “ā” with the long vowel line above it is pronounced “ay,” in contrast to the short vowel ă found in “hat” or “mad”. The “ah” sound is basically identical to the short “ŏ” in “hot”. I realize that the pronunciation marks from elementary school are a far cry from phonetic spelling used by linguists, audiologists, and speech therapists. So is Fowler using ā in āmen to represent “ah”?
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Digitonomy said:
This confuses me: I was always taught that “ā” with the long vowel line above it is pronounced “ay,” in contrast to the short vowel ă found in “hat” or “mad”. The “ah” sound is basically identical to the short “ŏ” in “hot”. I realize that the pronunciation marks from elementary school are a far cry from phonetic spelling used by linguists, audiologists, and speech therapists. So is Fowler using ā in āmen to represent “ah”?
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How did you type those symbols over the letters?
 
I live in North Texas and have been to a number of the parishes here. I would say that the ‘ay-mens’ and ‘ah-mens’ are about 50/50. I also don’t see a problem with either.
 
zab said:
How did you type those symbols over the letters?
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The first one I copied and pasted from nonsumd’s post. For the others I went into Word, clicked Insert - Symbol and then scrolled down until I found what I was looking for, inserted it, and copied it from that new document to paste here. I used to use ASCII codes for special characters, like Alt-0162 for ¢, but I can’t seem to get that to work right now. Regardless, ā and the like are not among the original ASCII characters, so Unicode is needed for the task.
 
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