[jcranmer]

> English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thousands of characters), Hindi (50+ letters), or French/German (latin with diacritics).

The English language has diacritics (see words like naïve, façade, résumé, or café). It's just that the English language uses them so rarely that they are largely dropped in any context where they are hard to introduce. Note that this adaptation to lack-of-diacritic can be found in other Latin script languages: French similarly is prone to loss-of-diacritic (especially in capital letters), whereas German has alternative spelling rules (e.g., Schroedinger instead of Schrödinger).