Like language itself, alphabets tend to evolve over time. So why, then, does English lack accent marks? And is this even a valid question to be asking? Ye Olde English Alphabet English spelling is really weird and inconsistent - so much so that students of the language are pretty much resigned to just memorizing words individually (as opposed to learning the rules of pronunciation and having it all make sense).
We’ve got through, thorough and enough - and none of those words are pronounced the same.
Eastern European tongues like Polish and Slovenian are no exception either, and some Asian languages that use Latin script (like Vietnamese) are also chock-full of them.Īnd English is a language that, frankly, could use a little more guidance and specificity in its orthography. Have you ever thought about the fact that a lot of other Latin alphabet languages besides English have accent marks? Spanish and French are two of the most immediate examples that come to mind for most people who were schooled in the American education system, but consider German, too, with its characteristic umlauts, or any of the Scandinavian tongues like Danish or Norwegian.
