archaic
/är-kā′ĭk/
adjective
- Relating to, being, or characteristic of a much earlier, often more primitive period, especially one that develops into a classical stage of civilization. an archaic bronze statuette; Archaic Greece.
- No longer current or applicable; antiquated: synonym: old. archaic laws.
- Relating to, being, or characteristic of words and language that were once in regular use but are now relatively rare and suggestive of an earlier style or period.
Using old poetry to discover archaic pronunciations.
How to Pronounce archaic Phonetically (With Audio)?
etymology - Why is "archaic" pronounced uniquely? Is the sequence -ɪɪ- only found in this word? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
He must be using an archaic pronunciation
Videos
Here's the first two lines of a poem I came across from, I believe, the early 1600's. (They are rhyming couplets, like every subsequent two line grouping in the poem).
This day dame Nature seem'd in love The lusty sap began to move
So was "move" pronounced "muhv", or was "love" pronounced "loove"?
How about some other common words that, through poetry, you've discovered to be pronounced a different way?
The standard pronunciation in British English is really /ɑːˈkeɪ ik/ (Longman Pronunciation Dictionary), and there is no alternative. The splitting of the digraph into two phonemes is understandable as a remnant of the initial pronunciation intended to preserve the French ([aʀkaik]); in the French pronunciation /ai/ is not a diphthong, but two separate sounds.
The sequence /-ɪ.ɪ-/ is also found in other words:
- voltaic, hebraic, mosaic (French), prosaic (French)
In English, there's a phoneme commonly called "long A" (because it evolved from what used to be a lengthened /a:/). This part's pretty uncontroversial: it's the phoneme in the middle of "face".
However, linguists have different views on how to transcribe this sound. It's often pronounced as a diphthong, so some people write it as /eɪ/, /ei/, or /ej/; other people just write it as /e/ for simplicity, and say it's fundamentally a single unit. This mostly comes down to a transcription convention. One standard way to talk about it (in a purely English context), without committing to any particular transcription, is "FACE" or "the FACE vowel".
In the word "archaic", the underlying phonemes in question are this "long A" (the FACE vowel) followed by "short I" (the KIT vowel). Some people transcribe this as /eɪ.ɪ/ or the like. But for me, I certainly don't pronounce the same vowel twice in a row: the off-glide of FACE is higher than the vowel in KIT. So I prefer to transcribe it instead as /ejɪ/, to emphasize this height difference.
The same sequence appears in a lot of words, when a suffix starting with KIT is attached to a root ending in FACE: others have mentioned "mosaic" and its ilk, but it also shows up in "laying" and so on.
P.S. As for how it happened: note the diaeresis in the Greek ἀρχαϊκός, indicating two separate vowels /a.i/ with a syllable break between them. When it was eventually borrowed into English (via Latin and French), this was how it was pronounced; later sound changes turned /a/ into /ej/ and /i/ into /ɪ/.