Yogh
Encyclopedia : Y : YO : YOG : Yogh
The letter yogh (Ȝ ȝ; Middle English: 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 [ŋ]) in hang. Some Lowland Scots words have a z in place of a yogh, gaberlunzie, 'a licensed beggar', tuilzie, 'a fight', capercailzie (from capall-coille, now normally spelt capercaillie in English); likewise the Scottish proper names listed below. "Shetland" was also written "Zetland" for a number of years, possibly as a corruption of Old Norse "Hjaltiland".
Yogh is shaped like the Arabic numeral three (3), which is sometimes substituted for the character in online reference works. It would seem that there is some confusion about the letter in the literature, as the English language was far from standardised at the time. The insular form of G — pronounced either [joʊk], [joʊg], [joʊ] or [joʊx] — came into Old English spelling via Irish. It stood for /g/ and its various allophones — including /g/ and the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] — as well as the phoneme /j/ (y in modern English spelling). In Middle English, its form developed into yogh, which stood for the phoneme /x/ as in niȝt (night, then still pronounced as spelled: [nixt]). Sometimes, yogh stood for /j/ or /w/, as in the word ȝoȝelinge [ˈjaʊlɪnge] = yowling. In the late Middle English period, yogh was no longer used: niȝt came to be spelled night. Middle English re-imported G in its French form for /g/.
In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh is used to represent the voiced interdental fricative: ȝoȝo, now written dhodho, pronounced [ðoðo].
It was the Normans whose scribes despised non-Latin characters and certain spellings in English and therefore replaced the yogh in words with the letters gh; still, the variety of pronunciations elaborated, as evidenced by cough, trough, and though. The process of replacing the Yogh with the gh was slow, however, and was not fully completed until the end of the 15th century. In English, not every word that contains a gh was originally spelled with a yogh: for example, spaghetti is Italian, where the h makes the g hard; ghoul is Arabic, in which the gh was the velar fricative mentioned above.
The medieval author named Orrm used this letter in three ways when writing Old English. By itself, it indicated the sound /j/, so he used this letter for the y in "yet". Doubled, it was the sound /i/, so he ended his spelling of "may" with two yoghs. And the digraph of yogh followed by an h indicated the voiced velar fricative /γ/.Crystal, David. The Stories of English. New York: Overlook Press, 2004 p. 197.
The glyph yogh can be found in surnames that start with Y in Scotland and Ireland, such as the surname Yeoman and sometimes spelled 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 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 (Ʒ ʒ), and yogh itself was not added to Unicode until version 3.0.