In French it’s often called the carré - the square - but I greatly prefer the term dièse, meaning sharp (as in music). It’s so charming! Like you want the star to be a flattened b instead.
And Catalan: enllaç. It was used in old Spanish too (whence the name: cedilla, “little Z”, from ceta or zeta, “z”), but was finally replaced by z.
There is a cedilla-like dewey in Czech or something too that isn’t actually a cedilla at all, but a comma, of all things.
I though German used ,text".
What was it used for before e-mails?
This is my understanding as well, I had a few years of high school German with a native speaker & that’s what she used.
In England, it was used to denote unit prices, e.g. 12 bottles of light ale @ 7d.
I think that’s in Romanian.
I don’t know German, so it’s possible, but I also remember reading that German used inverted French guillemets to denote quotes. Maybe some German-speaking doper (tschild, Schnitte?) will come and set us straight.
In German the usage in bookprint and newsprint is mostly „…“, i.e. opening the quote with U+201E and closing with U+201C. A mnemonic for that is 99-66. But the "double inward-pointing guillemets »…« are also to be found - both styles are approved by the Duden guidelines for typography. On typewriters and mostly also in wordprocessing straight double quotes (U+0022) are used