Other words pronounced like 'survey' are 'convey' and 'purvey' (an old-fashioned verb meaning sell). "Drey", "whey" and "Hey!", as in "Hey Jude", also rhyme with grey and prey.
A rule that seems more or less to work is that the "ay" sound is used in single syllable "ey" words or words ending in "ey" in which the stress is on the last syllable, but the ee sound is used if the stress is on a previous syllable. This works for 'survey' as a verb but not for 'survey' as a noun, and there are doubtless more exceptions. I've just thought of one: key.
Answer from Philip Wood on Stack ExchangeVideos
So the joke goes that you ask someone "what does Y.E.S spell?" and they'll reply with "yes" and then you'll ask them "what does E.Y.E.S spell?" and they'll likely reply with "yes" but I don't understand how people fall for saying "yes" because when my friend asked me "what does E.Y.E.S spell" I said "eyes".
As someone whose first language isn't english, I find pronouncing it very hard sometimes, I can't tell the difference between Word and World, andI think there's an abnormal ammount of almost-homophones-but-not-actual-homophones in english, I can tell that there is a difference between Word and World but when I try to speak, I say World instead of Word,
so I want to know if you, english speaker, if you do think "ey" and "ay" actually have a difference
I've noticed in British English many people say their "y"s as e instead of the pronunciation in most dictionaries which is ee. For example party as "paa te" instead of "paa tee". Is this proper British English or a dialect of some kind and if so what is it called
Basically the title lmao, srry if the question is stupid, im kindda new to the language
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.
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.