French and ... ? was Filename Translation

I have some notes on French accents at:
http://le.petit.four.free.fr/French_Resources/accents.htm
which may be of interest to some.

My understanding of the “accent” phenomenon is that the advent of printing (as everywhere) required some sort of spelling standardisation, and (to be simplistic) accents were introduced to distinguish otherwise identical words ( ou and où for example ) as well as to indicate how words were actually said (for example the é and è pronunciation.

So written French is a deliberately (mis)engineered phenomenon. Unfortunately we’re stuck with it. The French people are, nonetheless, charming and friendly in general, which I’ve discovered by taking the trouble to try to speak their language.

There are a lot of common roots between English and French, many of them coming through Old French, which was spoken here in earlier times.