A lot of glyph based idiosyncrasies like that in languages scripts are artifacts of the era of physical block types before we had shit like hot cast linotyping

A lot of glyph based idiosyncrasies like that in languages scripts are artifacts of the era of physical block types before we had shit like hot cast linotyping where the blocks were made on demand. What probably happened is umlauts were used a lot in German and some lazy typesetter wasn’t going to waste a perfectly good block sitting around that he could reuse