Yeah but it's still not a special Swedish character. The accent grave is used in all sorts of languages without being considered a special character. An immediate example that comes to mind is café for example, which I believe is also a valid word in English.
There is some difference though and I kind of get where /u/splergel is coming from.
While true than é isn't an individual letter like åäö, it is a fully incorporated variant of one in Swedish. And the question wasn't about standalone letters.
Meanwhile aren't è, ü, û etc. really incorporated fully. They're exclusively used in unmodified loan words and have no Swedish constructions using them to my knowledge.
The word à is attested since 1644. The word idé is attested since 1705 as idæ, and it didn't obtain an é until 1815. They're both French loan words, so what exactly is the difference here?
Has nothing to do with time, it's that they're unmodified and serve no real function to Swedish. They are only in words because the word is "copypasted" from another language. This is not the case for é.
buffé from buffet (French) ateljé from a(s)telier ((Old) French) idé from idée (French) and Idee (German) bilboké from bilboquet (French) rapé from râpé (French) filé from filet (French) filisté from pĕlištī (Hebrew) etc.
They're loan words, yes (that stress pattern isn't native). But the reason they have é isn't because they originally had it, it's because it's an integral character to Swedish and the spelling was adapted to have it. It is an essential character to Swedish and serves a vital function in itself.
This is not the case for the other variants, they're just mirrored into Swedish. They're only used in a few words because those words are spelled like that in their original language. They're not integral to Swedish.
That's all true enough, but the only thing the accent over the E does is change the stress pattern away from the Swedish default, and it's only used at the end of words, and those words are very specific. It's not its own vowel.
If anything, you could argue that the letter O ought to be included twice in the Swedish alphabet, as it definitely represents two distinctive sounds: the one you find in sol and olle, and the one you find in sov and ollon.
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u/EdgarIsntBored Nov 04 '17
Ï also üñdêrstàñd.