Depending on whom you ask, the English language evolved from French, Latin, Spanish and/or German.
Of these - French, Spanish and German all use accent marks. I’m talking about the Umlat, the Grave, the tilde, etc.
I’ve always wondered: why doesn’t English use accent marks like these other languages?
Because spoken English doesn’t need them.
The English language is sometimes naïve, and feels it doesn’t need accents. A greater use of accent marks would increase coöperation with the other European languages.
Ok, the latter is old-timey. But MS Word corrects you if you attempt to type “naive” with no accent.
English didn’t evolve from any of those languages, although it shares common roots with all of them. The Wiki article on the English language has a sample of its precursor, Old English, which as you can see contains no accents and very few other diacritical marks.
Latin has no accents or diacritical marks and yet its descendant languages like Spanish and French do have them.
I’m pretty sure that Wikipeida article says that German does not use the umlaut as an accent mark, and that other languages just borrowed the same symbol for a different purpose.
In Spanish, I believe the accent is used to show variation from the very standardized accent rules. Since English doesn’t have standardized rules, we wouldn’t gain from showing variation from them. Woo.
English occasionally uses diacritics: “‘Coöperation, belovèd!’ said the Victorian type-setter.” Wikipedia on the increasingly archaic diaeresis mark and the rarely used grave accent. I don’t know if the latter counts as an accent or not.
By the way, I remember hearing that the German umlaut evolved from the Roman cursive form of the letter [e], written superscript, but I can’t find a cite for this.
It should be noted that the function of the accent marks is quite different in Spanish and French.
As has been mentioned, the acute accent is used in Spanish to indicate stress on a syllable different from the one that should be stressed according to the standardized rules, or in some cases distinguish between words that differ in grammatical function. The diaresis is used to indicate a break between syllables that varies from the rules. Since the pronunciation of vowels is standardized, there is no need to indicate differences in pronunciation with accents. The tilde is used to distinguish ñ from n; these however are regarded as two different letters.
The French acute, grave, and circumflex accents are used to distinguish different pronunciations of vowels (or sometimes homophones with different meanings), rather than the stress on syllables. Many other irregularities of pronunciation compared to spelling are ignored. So one might ask why French doesn’t use more such marks, if it is going to use some.
A dinky little country and our language is spoken the world over.
Surely to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life.
>>I forget who said this<<
The German umlaut serves to change the pronunciation of a vowel rather than to accent it. It’s relatively recent, too; in olden days, an E was placed after the letter that the umlaut now appears above.
The Wikipedia article has a sample of how the E turned into two strokes.
As Siam Sam said, the Umlaut mark is to indicate that Ä, Ö, and Ü are pronounced as different vowels than A, O, and U. The double stroke over the letter (which in typesetting, is rendered as two dots) represents an E that used to follow the letter. In fact, when you do not have access to diacritics on a keyboard, German is spelled with the E after the vowels that would take the Umlaut in writing,
To add to what you said, Ñ is now regarded as a separate letter, but it started as shorthand for a double-N. This is obvious in words like año, which comes from Latin annus.
Just a coincidence. España has never been Espanna (and many if not most other words with a tilde).
Touché ! 
Quote Wikipedia “Diacritic”:
English is one of the few European languages that do not regularly use diacritical marks. Exceptions are unassimilated foreign loanwords, including borrowings from French and increasingly Spanish; however, the diacritic is also often omitted from such words. Loanwords that frequently appear with the diacritic in English include café, résumé (a usage that helps distinguish it from the verb resume, though the former is often miswritten resumé), and naïveté (see List of English words with diacritics). In older practice (and even among some orthographically conservative modern writers) one may see examples such as élite and rôle. English once used the diaeresis more often than not in words such as coöperate and zoölogy, but this practice has become far less common (The New Yorker’s house style is one of the few major publications to retain this feature, and various individual writers still use it). The acute and grave accents are occasionally used in poetry and lyrics: the acute to indicate stress overtly where it might be ambiguous (rébel vs. rebél) or nonstandard for metrical reasons (caléndar), the grave to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced (warnèd, parlìament). In certain personal names such as Renée and Zoë, the diacritical marks are included more often than omitted.
Diacritic marks in French are leftovers from shorthands and indicated missing letters. For example, the work for “head”, tête was originally spelt teste. “Summer”, été, was ested. Further: île → isle (“island”) and là → lai (“there”). That’s true in many cases but sometimes, they’re there natively – bière was always bière. Sometimes they’re there for no particular reason: why Noël and not Noel or Noèl? Because. You have to leave some room for imagination for something to be beautiful.
It’s ironic that what was meant to be a shorthand for writing longhand, now has the opposite effect when it comes to using a keyboard. It annoys me just to use the apostrophe, let alone having to option-e-e or option-u-o (on a Mac) every other damn vowel. Or is there a more efficient way to type in other languages besides English?
On German keyboards we have proper keys for Ä/ä Ö/ö Ü/ü and ß. However we have about the same number of physical keys and unfortunately this means that several special characters have been moved to inconvenient positions.
{, [, ], }, \ at AltGr+7 through AltGr+0 are somewhat suboptimal and make things like typing TeX pretty annoying.
Here is a picture.
And to further that, kellner, most Americans don’t even know what AltGr is, how to turn it on (it’s off by default) and what it’s even for.
cmyk, I like the Mac’s method for the US keyboard layout, mostly because the physical key caps don’t have to change in order to properly reflect the key that will be typed. Of course I’ve been doing it the Mac way since 1988 or so, so the muscle memory is there. The Windows way with US keyboard layouts if crap, i.e., you can use alt-numeric codes, or set up US-International, except then your quotes don’t work properly unless you remember to press the space bar every time you want a real quote (in other words, I haven’t developed the muscle memory for that). Fortunately there are US-Mac keyboard layouts available on the net for making the Windows keyboard behave identically to the Mac keyboard.
Probably because the word is pronounced “No-el”, and the dieresis or tréma in French is used to indicate that two vowels are to be pronounced separately. After all, “oe” in French is usually seen in the oe-ligature, which is pronounced very differently. Compare with œuf and sœur.
I’ve heard that poète was written poëte until a hundred years or so ago. Maybe Noël will have the same evolution.
I travel a lot on business to Germany, and sometimes I don’t happen to have my own laptop with me when I need to use a computer. The different placement of the keys is always very disconcerting at first, especially the “y” and the “z”.
Ed
