Say the name correctly, please

Last month, the Dean of the Westminster Abbey in London corrected a historical typo, so to say. He got diaereses added over the letter e in the surnames of Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne, well-known 19th-century English writers.

- SATISH KUMAR SHARMA

A diaeresis is the twin dots over a letter – like over i in naïve. The omission had happened when stone tablets were erected in the Abbey's Poets' Corner in October 1939 to commemorate them. It took 85 years to be noticed by someone, so much for the fabled British punctiliousness.

Anyway, the woman journalist who spotted it, recently, felt that the rectification was necessary so that people would pronounce the surname correctly as 'Brontë' and not to rhyme with 'front' or 'font'.

It was a fair concern considering the ironies and inconsistencies of English pronunciations, which are the stuff of jokes. Even within England, people are known to intone the same word differently – which inspired the song, 'Why can't the English learn to speak…' in the Audrey Hepburn musical, 'My Fair Lady'.