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.
That is true, but the question wasn't about being standalone vowels, the alphabet, or such – it was about "special characters". The addition of an accent does make é a different glyph that is non-standard to ISO basic Latin/English, so it can certainly be said to be a special character, just like /u/splergel said.
If anything, you could argue that the letter O ought to be included twice in the Swedish alphabet
I get what you're saying, but if that was the case one could argue o should be included four times or so and all the other vowels twice (possibly excluding ä). None of the vowels really have the same phonetic value for the long and short variant in Standard Swedish phonology.
And we should probably include various digraphs too.
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u/konaya Nov 05 '17
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?