Other than words imported from other languages, are there any standard English words which require an accent?

sportsherald

Everyone speaks all of its words with one accent or another... Assuming you mean a printed mark to aid pronunciation (diacritic), I can't find any such words. The list at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_words_with_diacritics only contains imported words. Other sites, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_with_diacritics support this lack of non-import standard English words with diacritics. At http://tiny.cc/books-google-ca one can view in Dennis Freeborn's "From Old English to Standard English" the line, "English is the only European language which does not use additional signs as diacritics..." One rare exception is listed here, however: "Third, a grave accent is occasionally written over the letter e in the ending -ed to show that it is pronounced as a separate syllable. Thus we write a learnèd scholar or an agèd man to show that learnèd and agèd are each pronounced here as two syllables. Compare I learned French at school and He has aged rapidly, in which learned and aged are pronounced as single syllables." -from http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=7539 Apr 28 12, 5:59 PM

satguru

I've just seen naive in a newspaper with an umlaut above it, I don't think I have before and it is a French import, but we've imported many other words with them and usually lose them when they become English. Aug 27 12, 3:33 PM