memes

English did historically use æ, as the Latin ae-ligature (along with œ), though it went out of fashion at around the end of the Victorian era, and may not have been used in American English except as a stylistic affectation.

English historically has not done vowel symbols other than AEIOU and the occasional Y, leaving the speaker to bloody well figure out themselves which vowel sound a letter represents in a specific word, leaving it free to use ligatures and diacriticals as accents (i.e. the archaic dieresis in “coördinate” informing the reader that the “oo” is not a “ooh” digraph, these days seen only in the New Yorker). In contrast, languages like German and the Scandinavian languages treat accented vowels as distinct vowels of their own, moving them to the end of the alphabet in the dictionary.