As much as I would like to embarrass my local electronic store, I suspect it really isn’t their fault. The history of computing, if you go back far enough, is littered with acronyms such as ASCII and EBCDIC which were the character sets that computers used.
These character sets were designed to represent numbers, Latin letters in both upper and lower case, punctuation as well as some control codes. These character sets did include support for diacritic marks found in other languages such as Celtic, …, Estonian, Finnish, French, … German, Slavic, Spanish just to name a few.
Apparently other cultures were fond of the proper representation of their written language so in the intervening decades there were new character set solutions where developed on computers which did correct this shortcoming. Either the software came from an English speaking country or no effort was made to support local languages or perhaps both.
What was this item? It is a “Universal sortiment kasten 20 fächer” otherwise known as a small plastic box that was divided up into 20 compartments each of which can be used hold small parts.