What's the with ë?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can safely delete this message and go on with your day.

For my whole life, my last name has caused problems. Minor problems, but problems I decided I would fix.

First, Olesen often gets misspelled. “Son of Olaf” mutated into many forms across Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The Swedes, the most numerous immigrants to America, wrote it Olsson. Ellis Island turned that into Olson. This is the spelling people expect. My name, Olesen, with two e’s, is relatively common in Denmark, but Danes are relatively rare in the United States. That middle e is often missed.

Second, its not obvious how to pronounce “Olesen.” My family usually says it with two syllables. This isn’t correct, but it’s easy, and they don’t stand on ceremony. Some people find it vexing that I don’t have a clear preference on how to pronounce my own name.

Here I tell you: Olesen has two e’s and three syllables: OH-luh-sn. To make that clear, I’m using the Brontë dots: Olësen.

I considered many alternatives to the Brontë dots. An acute accent (Olésen) would give the wrong emphasis (oh-LAY-sen). A grave accent (Olèsen) would give the emphasis and the wrong vowel (oh-LEHH-sen). There are many other options (ē, ě, ė, ę, etc.), but none of them do what I want: “hey, don’t ignore this letter!”

The two dots mark (ë) had two traditional functions, neither of which works for me either. The umlaut changes a vowel’s pronunciation: German Kamm sounds like “kaam” but Kämm sounds like “kemm”. The diaresis shows that two adjacent vowels should be kept separate: naïve is two syllables and doesn’t sound like “knives". We used to write coöperate to make sure it didn’t sound like “(re)cuperate.”

But two hundred years ago, a man faced a problem like mine, and I follow his solution. Patrick Brunty was born to a poor family in Ireland. He showed his intelligence to the local priest, who educated Patrick and helped him get to the University of Cambridge, where his started writing his name as Brontë. No one knows exactly why. Patrick respected Lord Nelson, who was Duke of Bronte, named after a town in Sicily. Patrick also would have known that the ancient Greek word brontē means “thunder.” But maybe he just didn’t like that Brunty looked lower class and that an unadorned final e in Bronte might get swallowed into “Bront.”

Patrick’s great accomplishment, of creating a novel diacritical mark, neither an umlaut or diaresis, one that simply says “I’m a vowel, don’t forget me,” was overshadowed by the work of his daughters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.

(In recent days, a band, wanting a name that looked Germanic and menacing, and caring nothing for learnèd orthography, named themselves Mötley Crüe, thus inventing the metal umlaut. This invention has nothing to do with ancient Greece, or Sicily, or Lord Nelson, so I completely reject it.)