I’ve never seen this letter used in Latin before, only in English. How did you write it? It seems to confuse the online dictionaries, which is a bit of a shame.
auch die Deutschen Dix.können diesen Doppelbuchstaben nicht einordnen…
In Classical Latin, the combination Æ denotes the diphthong [ai̯], which had a value similar to the long i in fine as pronounced in most dialects of modern English. Both classical and present practice is to write the letters separately, but the ligature was used in medieval and early modern writings in part because æ was reduced to the simple vowel [ɛ] in the imperial period. … However, the ligature is still relatively common in liturgical books and musical scores.
see Æ - Wikipedia
Yes, as hape points out, it’s a graphic diphthong, pronounced separately in Classic Latin and as “è” in Ecclesiastical Latin.
I used it (alt+145) because I thought it looked more Latin. (This version was taken from the Vatican website and they wrote it as one letter too.)
Anyway, I can replace the diphthong with the two-letter writing.
Is it possible to write “œ” as two separate letters in French (i.e “soeur” instead of “sœur”)?
Hmm… it is possible but it looks wrong and the Word spell checker will mark it as wrong.