that’s because they are, umlauts came from writing vowel digraphs as the first letter with the second letter above it, for example ueber/veber -> uͤber/vͤber -> über/v̈ber -> über (although über in particular didn’t actually originally have the spelling ueber). “e” turned into two lines, which now is represented as two dots/a diaeresis on most computer fonts. that’s why, if you don’t have access to diacritics (e.g. on technology), you write ä/ö/ü like ae/oe/ue (and why you have names which are spelled like Goethe instead of Göthe)
that’s because they are, umlauts came from writing vowel digraphs as the first letter with the second letter above it, for example ueber/veber -> uͤber/vͤber -> über/v̈ber -> über (although über in particular didn’t actually originally have the spelling ueber). “e” turned into two lines, which now is represented as two dots/a diaeresis on most computer fonts. that’s why, if you don’t have access to diacritics (e.g. on technology), you write ä/ö/ü like ae/oe/ue (and why you have names which are spelled like Goethe instead of Göthe)
Oh that’s neat!