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Message:: [QUOTE="kevin McGonigal, post: 7829066, member: 72790"]Those familiar with Classical Latin and its pronunciation know that circa the time of Cicero and Virgil the diphthong, AE was pronounced the same as the Greek AI as "eye". Those familiar with the later Italianate or ecclesiastical Latin know that the diphthong AE is spoken as English long A as in "day", the same as way Latin E was said both in Classical and Ecclesiastical Latin.  Thus by late in the Third Century that switch may have been already under way and both AE and E had acquired the same sound, meaning that whichever way it was spelled it had the same pronunciation. If so there may have been two variant spellings late Third Century but the sound would have been the same, the English long A sound. By the way I can recall in one of my Latin classes from way back that our professor told us there was philological evidence that the change in the sound of Latin AE was already in evidence as early as Tacitus which would make it around 100 AD. Too bad we don't have more evidence like wall graffiti where posters often spelled their words using "invented spelling" which was a phonetic spelling that tell us better how the language was being spoken in the streets as it morphed its way to the Romance languages. A big thanks to the observant OP for noticing this bit of linguistic (as well as numismatic) evidence.[/QUOTE]