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Comment by hedberg10 | Hacker News Reader

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hedberg10·

Behold, the superiority of the German language, having Emojis build in before they were invented:

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We have that in Estonia too, but we also have the extreme-surprise emoji Ö

Some say that Cyrillic letter Ы is a single character for "lol".

That letter is interesting to me for being two separate pieces. Any idea how that happened?

Honestly, I don't know.

But Wikipedia says it was a ligature of two letters ("Ь" and "I"), which later changed their values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yery#Origin

Icelandic has the 'Ö' and also the 'Þ' (goes very well with ':').

Not sure what the 'Æ' could stand in for though

Æ looks like the blank face of shame. Somehow I'm picturing E being the mouth's shape in that expression

That one's also part of German. They have umlauts for A, O, and U. Though as far as I can tell, the German Ä is just a variant of "E".

The other two are their own vowels, and they used to be rendered in English as "oe" and "ue". It's not clear to me why we decided that it was better to write "Gödel" as "Godel" than as "Goedel".

Why used to be? I still see on a daily basis and I think I never saw ö rendered as o (when the writer knew what they were doing)

He probably wanted to get Email, when Umlauts weren't in the spec yet. I don't know though, I totally made that up.

It's not difficult for English speakers to write "e".

In German chats, before emoticons, ppl used *g* (grins=smile)

Weird how they overlooked the Ü

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