I had always subliminally (but nearer to my mind's conscious 'part'!) thought that why we pronounce acute accent as /eɪ/, but had never come up with the idea of posing it here. Well, last night I did! 🙂
Mostly the words containing the accent have been borrowed from French, far as I know, and they, the French, pronounce it as /e/, the 'accent aigu'.
Is it rooted in some older version of English? Or in Latin?
They are all borrowed words, no exception !
A weird point: does English take liberty to add accent ? Yes: saké. Japanese writing doesn't even have the concept of the accent as the alphabets know it. Except possibly saké originated from one of the accented European languages. No way to prove either way.
English has the diaeresis, though sometimes omitted: naïve, Noël, Chloë , Zoë, Brontë.
Acute accent is not native to English.
Saké most likely was Dutch first, Dutch being early European visitors to the Far East.
RobertB said:
They are all borrowed words, no exception !
Yes, but my main point was that why we pronounce it as /eɪ/, and not /e/, as the French do.
It would be very foreign in English for a word to end with /e/. The closest sound natural to English would be the diphthong.