English
Etymology
Origin uncertain.Pronunciation
- /jɒg/|/jɒx/
Noun
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 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 (,) 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 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., [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 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 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 character as the transliteration of the Ancient Egyptian "aleph" glyph: A The symbol actually used in Egyptology is 10px|, two half-rings opening to the left, which as of Unicode 5.0 has not been assigned its proper codepoint. It is often represented by the numeral 3 for technical reasons.
References
External links
yogh in Breton: Yogh (lizherenn)
yogh in German: Ȝ
yogh in Spanish: Yogh
yogh in French: Yogh
yogh in Italian: Yogh
yogh in Norwegian: Yogh
yogh in Polish: Ȝ
yogh in Scots: Yoch
yogh in Swedish: Yogh
yogh in Chinese: Ȝ