> On the fundamentals, the letters are separate; that is the conclusion you'd come to, for French éè or Icelandic oö, by studying the writing system. This is t

> On the fundamentals, the letters are separate; that is the conclusion you'd come to, for French éè or Icelandic oö, by studying the writing system. This is the part we most disagree on. In my opinion, there is no fundamental definition of a letter, or at least the fundamental definition is graphical, entirely unrelated to pronunciation. By my definition, é è ö are fundamentally combinations of diacritical marks applied to a base letter (e, for the first two; o for the second). And the reason I don't think there is any link between letters and their pronunciation is that letters are just not pronounced in a single way, regardless of any extra marks on them. In French in particular, e can be pronounced ə, such as in "sucre"; it can be pronounced œ such as in "me"; it can be pronounced "ɑ̃" such as in "Rouen"; it can be pronounced "e" such as in "chanter" (which is the same sound that é usually marks); or it can be pronounced as ɛ such as in "elle" (the first e). All of these are extremely common, not some obscure phonetics of one particular word. Also, another reason we can see the accents are diacritical marks and not separate letters is the history of how they came about. French orthography has a bunch of rules about how different other letters modify the pronunciation of "e". The accents were added in those places where the regular rules aren't otherwise followed. So we spell the infinitive "chanter" and the second person indicative "chantez", because with the final "r" or "z" it's clear that the "e" is pronounced as "e", but we spell the participle "chanté" (pronounced identically) to distinguish it from "chante".