🤔 Ever typed on a German keyboard and wondered what these letters are: ä, ö, and ü? In German, they're called "Umlaute" (umlauts). 📜 But why do they exist? More than 500 years ago, scribes wrote an "e" above or after vowels in German—like ae, oe, ue—to represent sounds that didn’t exist in Latin, the language from which German evolved in part. Jacob Grimm—yes, the one from the Grimm’s Fairy Tales like Cinderella—coined the term “Umlaut” for these combinations in the early 19th century. 🔪 Toda