Everything about Yogh totally explained
» Not to be confused with the unrelated ʒ. For the rune transcribed as ȝ
, see Gyfu.
The letter
yogh (;
Middle English: ) was used in
Middle English and
Middle Scots, representing y (/j/) 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 [ŋ]) in
hang.
In Middle English writing,
tailed z came to be indistinguishable from yogh. In
Middle Scots the character yogh representing the sound /j/ came to be confused with a cursive z and the early Scots printers often used z, when yogh wasn't available in their fonts. 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.
Pronunciation
Yogh is pronounced either [joʊk], [joʊɡ], [joʊ] or [joʊx] It stood for /ɡ/ and its various allophones — including [ɡ] and the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] — as well as the phoneme /j/ (
y in modern
English spelling). In Middle English, it came to stand for the phoneme /x/ as in (night, then still pronounced as spelled: [nixt]). Sometimes, yogh stood for /j/ or /w/, as in the word [ˈjaʊlɪŋɡe] = yowling.
In medieval
Cornish manuscripts, yogh is used to represent the voiced interdental fricative as in, now written
dhodho, pronounced [ðoðo].
History
Old English
The original Germanic
g sound was expressed by the
Gyfu rune in the
Anglo-Saxon futhorc (which is itself rendered as
ȝ in modern
transliteration). Following palatalization, both
gyfu and Latin
g in Old English expressed the /j/ sound before front vowels. For example, "year" was written as
géar, even though the word had never had a
g sound (deriving from
PIE *yōr-).
With the re-introduced possibility of a /g/ sound before front vowels, notably in the form of loanwords from the
Old Norse (such as
gere from Norse
gervi, Modern English
gear), this orthographical state of affairs became a source for confusion, and a distinction of "real
g" (/g/) from "palatalized
g" (/j/) became desirable.
In the Old English period, the ȝ glyph was simply the way Latin
g was written in the
Uncial script introduced at the
Christianization of England by the
Irish missionaries.
It only came to be used as a letter
distinct from
g in the Middle English period.
Middle English
Norman 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 wasn't 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 (for example, [g] instead of [dʒ]);
ghoul is
Arabic, in which the
gh was /ɣ/.
The medieval author
Orm used this letter in three ways when writing Old English. By itself, it represented /j/, so he used this letter for the
y in "yet". Doubled, it represented /i/, so he ended his spelling of "may" with two yoghs. Finally, the digraph of yogh followed by an
h represented /ɣ/.
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 /ɡ/.
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 didn't 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 (Ʒ ʒ), and yogh itself wasn't 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.
Scottish words with 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 /kʌˈleɪn/)
Dalziel — pronounced deeyel (IPA /diːˈɛl/), from Gaelic Dail-gheal; also spelled Dalyell.
Drumelzier - pronounced "drumellier"
Finzean — pronounced fingen (IPA /ˈfɪŋən/)
Glenzier — pronounced glinger (IPA /glɪŋər/)
MacKenzie — originally pronounced makenyie (IPA /məkˈenjɪ/), from Gaelic MacCoinnich; now usually pronounced with /z/, though as late as 1946 George Black recorded the form with /j/ as standard
Menzies — most correctly pronounced mingis (IPA /ˈmɪŋɪs/), from Gaelic Mèinnearach; now controversially also pronounced with /z/
Winzet — pronounced winyet (IPA /ˈwɪnjət/)
Zell - Archaic spelling of "Isle of Yell"
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 adopted by the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale 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, which as of Unicode 5.0 hasn't been assigned its proper codepoint. It is often represented by the numeral 3 for technical reasons.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Yogh'.
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