It's not "only". A similar question is why does ASCII have a control character for ringing a bell? The answer is that the character sets were designed with spe

It's not "only". A similar question is why does ASCII have a control character for ringing a bell? The answer is that the character sets were designed with specific hardware in mind and often with backwards compatibility. The accented characters were in use for typewriter and printer with a typewriter like interface or even hardware.