Yogh

:"Not to be confused with the unrelated ʒ. For the rune transcribed as "ȝ", see Gyfu."

The letter yogh (latinx|Ȝ latinx|ȝ; Middle English: latinx|ȝogh) was used in Middle English and Middle Scots, representing y (IPA|/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 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 IPA|/j/ came to be confused with a cursive z and the early Scots printers often used z, when yogh was not 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 (latinx|Ȝ,latinx|ȝ) are represented in Unicode by code points U+021C and U+021D respectively.

Pronunciation

"Yogh" is pronounced either IPA| [joʊk] , IPA| [joʊɡ] , IPA| [joʊ] or IPA| [joʊx] It stood for IPA|/ɡ/ and its various allophones — including IPA| [ɡ] and the voiced velar fricative IPA| [ɣ] — as well as the phoneme IPA|/j/ ("y" in modern English spelling). In Old English, it also stoond for the phoneme IPA|/x/ as in latinx|niȝt (night, then pronounced as spelled: IPA| [nixt] ). Sometimes, yogh stood for IPA|/j/ or IPA|/w/, as in the word latinx|ȝoȝelinge IPA| [ˈjaʊlɪŋɡe] = yowling.

In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh is used to represent the voiced interdental fricative as in latinx|ȝoȝo, now written "dhodho", pronounced IPA| [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 "latinx|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 latinx|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 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., IPA| [g] instead of IPA| [dʒ] ); "ghoul" is Arabic, in which the "gh" was IPA|/ɣ/.

The medieval author Orm used this letter in three ways when writing Old English. By itself, it represented IPA|/j/, so he used this letter for the "y" in "yet". Doubled, it represented IPA|/i/, so he ended his spelling of "may" with two yoghs. Finally, the digraph of yogh followed by an "h" represented IPA|/ɣ/. [cite book |last=Crystal |first=David |authorlink=David Crystal |title=The Stories of English |date=2004-09-09 |publisher=Overlook Press |location=New York |id=ISBN 1-58567-601-2 |pages=197]

In the late Middle English period, yogh was no longer used: latinx|niȝt came to be spelled "night." Middle English re-imported G in its French form for IPA|/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 "latinx|ȝeman". 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 on presses in that era 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 (unicode|Ʒ unicode|ʒ), 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")
*, latinx|yȝened (past participles of "yield" and "yean")
* ("harboured")
* ("ear")
* ("hastened")
* ("gift")
* ("yes")
* ("yesterday")
* ("yester-")
* ("yet")
* ("give" or "if")

cottish words with representing <latinx|ȝ>

"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".

*Bunzion - pronounced "bunion", Lower and Upper Bunzion are farms in the Parish of Cults, Fife.
*Culzean — "culain" (IPA IPA|/kʌˈleɪn/)
*Dalziel — pronounced "deeyel" (IPA IPA|/diːˈɛl/), from Gaelic "Dail-gheal"; also spelled Dalyell.
*Drumelzier - pronounced "drumellier"
*Finzean — pronounced "fingen" (IPA IPA|/ˈfɪŋən/)
*Glenzier — pronounced "glinger" (IPA IPA|/glɪŋər/)
*MacKenzie — originally pronounced "makenyie" (IPA IPA|/məkˈenjɪ/), from Gaelic "MacCoinnich"; now usually pronounced with IPA|/z/, though as late as 1946 George Black recorded the form with /j/ as standard [George Black, "The Surnames of Scotland", 1946, p. 525.]
*Menzies — most correctly pronounced "mingis" (IPA IPA|/ˈmɪŋɪs/), a variant of "Manners" [Hanks, P. (2003) "Dictionary of American Family Names" Oxford University Press] , now controversially also pronounced with IPA|/z/
*Winzet — pronounced "winyet" (IPA 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 [http://www.ifao.egnet.net/c.php?f=/doc/Outils/Polices.php Polices] , IFAO.] suggests the use of the Unicode Unicode|ȝ character as the transliteration of the Ancient Egyptian "aleph" glyph: AThe symbol actually used in Egyptology is , two half-rings opening to the left, since Unicode 5.1 it has been assigned its proper codepoints (uppercase U+A722 Ꜣ, lowercase U+A723 ꜣ). It is often represented by the numeral "3" for technical reasons.

References

External links

* Michael Everson's essay [http://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/ezhyogh.html "On the derivation of YOGH and EZH"]
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4595228.stm BBC on the use of the letter in former Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell's first name]