in all seriousness, it’s likely because the origin of the emoticon is tied in with the ASCII character set, and the codes available when the emoticon was conceived. emoticons were around for decades, before we started using them on phones.
Eh, I feel like we would’ve adopted our own style by now. For example, this face ^^ was fairly popular in the German internet before mobile phones and emojis took over, because it’s just two key presses on the German keyboard.
I think, the main problem is simply that umlauts look like letters to us. If someone types a random Ü or Ö after their sentence, you might think they meant to write another sentence. Or you simply do not register that it’s supposed to resemble a face, because it’s just a letter in your mind. Much like you presumably don’t either look at an E and think that it looks like a rake, because the association with the letter is much stronger.
in all seriousness, it’s likely because the origin of the emoticon is tied in with the ASCII character set, and the codes available when the emoticon was conceived. emoticons were around for decades, before we started using them on phones.
in fact, “smilies” are indeed not German!!!
Eh, I feel like we would’ve adopted our own style by now. For example, this face ^^ was fairly popular in the German internet before mobile phones and emojis took over, because it’s just two key presses on the German keyboard.
I think, the main problem is simply that umlauts look like letters to us. If someone types a random Ü or Ö after their sentence, you might think they meant to write another sentence. Or you simply do not register that it’s supposed to resemble a face, because it’s just a letter in your mind. Much like you presumably don’t either look at an E and think that it looks like a rake, because the association with the letter is much stronger.