> I've always wondered why accents are generally added before the letter in most systems. As with many of these things, it’s a holdover from typewriters. ‘Dead

> I've always wondered why accents are generally added before the letter in most systems. As with many of these things, it’s a holdover from typewriters. ‘Dead keys’ in typewriters were literally keys which did not move the carriage to the next position: thus to get accented characters you would type the dead key, then the letter, so that both would end up in the same position on the page. (Incidentally, this also explains why we so often use SPC after a dead key to get the base character.)