YOGH

The letter 'yogh' ( ; Middle English: ) was used in Middle English and Middle Scots, representing y () and various velar phonemes. Velars are sounds that are usually made when the back of the tongue is pressed against the soft palate. They include the ''k'' in ''cat'', the ''g'' in ''girl'', and the ''ng'' (IPA ) in ''hang.''
In Middle English writing, tailed z came to be indistinguishable from yogh, and consequently some Lowland Scots words have a ''z'' in place of a yogh.
Yogh is shaped like the Arabic numeral three (3), which is sometimes substituted for the character in online reference works. There is some confusion about the letter in the literature, as the English language was far from standardised at the time. The upper and lower case letters (,) are represented in Unicode by code points U+021C and U+021D respectively.

Contents

Pronunciation

History

Before the fifteenth century

After the development of printing

List of words containing a yogh

Scottish words representing <>

In Egyptology

References

External links

Pronunciation

The insular form of G — pronounced either , , or — came into Old English spelling via Irish. It stood for and its various allophones — including and the voiced velar fricative — as well as the phoneme (y in modern English spelling). In Middle English, its form developed into yogh, which stood for the phoneme as in (night, then still pronounced as spelled: ). Sometimes, yogh stood for or , as in the word = yowling.

History

In the late Middle English period, yogh was no longer used: came to be spelled ''night.'' Middle English re-imported G in its French form for .

In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh is used to represent the voiced interdental fricative: , now written ''dhodho'', pronounced .

Before the fifteenth century

It was the Normans whose scribes despised non-Latin characters and certain spellings in English and therefore replaced the yogh with the digraph ''gh''; still, the variety of pronunciations elaborated, as evidenced by ''cough'', ''trough'', and ''though''. The process of replacing the yogh with ''gh'' was slow, and was not fully completed until the end of the fifteenth century. Not every English word that contains a ''gh'' was originally spelled with a yogh: for example, ''spaghetti'' is Italian, where the ''h'' makes the ''g'' hard (i.e., instead of ); ''ghoul'' is Arabic, in which the ''gh'' was .
The medieval author Orm used this letter in three ways when writing Old English. By itself, it represented , so he used this letter for the ''y'' in "yet". Doubled, it represented , so he ended his spelling of "may" with two yoghs. Finally, the digraph of yogh followed by an ''h'' represented .^[1]

After the development of printing

The glyph yogh can be found in surnames that start with Y in Scotland and Ireland, such as the surname Yeoman and sometimes spelled ''. Because the shape of the yogh was identical to some forms of the handwritten letter ''z'', the ''z'' replaced the yogh in many Scottish words when the printing press was introduced. Most type used in the printing presses of that day did not have the letter yogh, resulting in the substitution of the letter ''z''.
In Unicode 1.0 the character yogh was mistakenly unified with the quite different character Ezh ( ), and yogh itself was not added to Unicode until version 3.0.

List of words containing a yogh

These are words which contain the letter 'yogh' in their spellings. All are obsolete.

★ ("night") ★ ("eye") ★ ("yea") ★ ("hallowed") ★ ("gate") ★ (past tense of "go") ★ , (past participles of "yield" and "yean") ★ ("harboured")

★ ("ear") ★ ("hastened") ★ ("gift") ★ ("yes") ★ ("yesterday") ★ ("yester-") ★ ("yet") ★ ("give" or "if")

Scottish words representing <>

''gaberlunzie'', 'a licensed beggar', ''tuilzie'', 'a fight', ''capercailzie'' (from ''capall-coille'', now normally spelt capercaillie in English); "Shetland" was also written "Zetland" for a number of years, possibly as a corruption of Old Norse "Hjaltiland".

★ Culzean — ''culain'' (IPA )

★ Dalziel — pronounced ''deeyel'' (IPA ), from Gaelic ''Dail-gheal''; also spelled Dalyell.

★ Finzean — pronounced ''fingen'' (IPA )

★ Glenzier — pronounced ''glinger'' (IPA )

★ MacKenzie — originally pronounced ''makenyie'' (IPA ), from Gaelic ''MacCoinnich''; now usually pronounced with

★ Menzies — most correctly pronounced ''mingis'' (IPA ), from Gaelic ''Mèinnearach''; now controversially also pronounced with

★ Winzet — pronounced ''winyet'' (IPA )

★ Zetland — the name for Shetland until the 1970s. Shetland postcodes begin with the letters ZE.
The town of Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, was previously called Cadzow; and the word Cadzow continues in modern use in many streetnames and other names, eg. Cadzow Castle.

In Egyptology

A Unicode-based transliteration system is adopted by the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale Polices, IFAO. suggests the use of the Unicode ȝ character as the transliteration of the Ancient Egyptian "aleph" glyph, A.
The symbol actually used in Egyptology is , two half-rings opening to the left, often represented by the numeral ''3'' for technical reasons, which as of Unicode 5.0 has not been assigned its proper codepoint.

References

1. The Stories of English, , David, Crystal, Overlook Press, , ISBN 1-58567-601-2

External links

★ Michael Everson's essay "On the derivation of YOGH and EZH"

★ BBC on the use of the letter in Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell's first name