Why is the name Phoebe often written with the o and the e mashed together?

Answer 1

it is the french style of writting it shows you how to pronouce it.

Answer 2

Because it's a representation of a Greek name. In Greek, (well, Ancient Greek, anyway), vowels get smooshed together to form "strong vowels."

But in this case, I think it's because Phoebe used to be pronounced with an "oi" sound instead of an "ee" sound for the "oe". I guess the vowel sounds changed around the 1800s in Greek and most vowel combinations wound up as "ee" in pronunciation.

But not in spelling.

So you see aetna with the AE mooshed together, encyclopaedia with the ae mooshed, and phoebe/Phoebe with the oe mushed.

I guess it's a roundabout way for English spellers to demonstrate that the ancient Greek had two letters in the word, but that it's a mooshed-together vowel in modern Greek.

Boy, this sounds awfully dense and confusing to me. Let me give you a slightly clearer example.

Take the "ph" spelling for Greek words that have a "ffff" sound. Technically, Greek has an "f" letter, "phi". But it also has a mooshed version of "ffff", where if you put a "p" and a "hhhh" sound together, you get "ffff." Never mind that Greek no longer has that sound, only the palatal fricative "kh", like in Spanish and Arabic and Hebrew. Like in "Ch" anukah or "J" uego.

This question is trying my nerves.

OK, skip all that. That's four years of linguistics classes talking.

++++++++++++++++++++++++The real answer++++++++++
English spelling is atrocious. But English speakers, especially those who wrote dictionaries and spelling guides, wanted to show the etymology of words (so they could show that they knew, say, Greek or Latin.)

So they put in weird spellings so common folk would say, "huh?" and learned folk would say, "ahhhh, I see that the spelling represents the word's origins!"

English spelling is such a mess.

Thus endeth the lesson