Yogh


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Not to be confused with the unrelated ʒ. For the rune transcribed as ȝ, see Gyfu.
Capital yogh (left), lowercase yogh (right)

The letter yogh (Ȝ ȝ; Middle English: yoȝ) 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 (Ȝ,ȝ) are represented in Unicode by code points U+021C and U+021D respectively.

Contents

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 Old English, it also stood for the phoneme /x/ as in niȝt (night, then pronounced as spelled: [nixt]). Sometimes, yogh stood for /j/ or /w/, as in the word ȝoȝelinge [ˈjaʊlɪŋɡe] = yowling.

In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh is used to represent the voiced interdental fricative as in ȝoȝo, now written dhodho, pronounced [ðoðo].

History

Yogh used for /x/: God spede þe plouȝ:& sende us korne inolk

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., [ɡ] 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/.[1]

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 /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 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 (Ʒ 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.

  • ȝhere ("ear")
  • yhyȝed ("hastened")
  • ȝiefte ("gift")
  • ȝise ("yes")
  • ȝista(i/y) ("yesterday")
  • ȝister- ("yester-")
  • ȝit(e) ("yet")
  • ȝive ("give" or "if")

Scottish words with <z> representing <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 /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 [2]
  • Menzies — most correctly pronounced mingis (IPA /ˈmɪŋɪs/), a variant of Manners [3], 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[4] 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, 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

  1. ^ Crystal, David (2004-09-09). The Stories of English. New York: Overlook Press, 197. ISBN 1-58567-601-2. 
  2. ^ George Black, The Surnames of Scotland, 1946, p. 525.
  3. ^ Hanks, P. (2003) Dictionary of American Family Names Oxford University Press
  4. ^ Polices, IFAO.

External links

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

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