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Why English doesn't use accents
And why French is full of them
This weekend we’ll be exploring the history of colour words: how ‘blue’ is more recent than you think, why ‘black’ and ‘bleach’ come from the same root, and how global trade gave us our modern-day rainbow. But what they all have in common is that they were creations of the Renaissance, and very typical ones at that: like many of the products of that era, French diacritics combined classical inspiration (e.g., taking cues from the Greek accent system) with the modern impulse to systematize and rationalize. In England, on the other hand, what the Renaissance systematized was the status quo: the basic spelling patterns of English laid down by Norman scribes in the 11th century, which used combinations of letters to express different sounds.
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