Gourt Home::Gourt :: Yogh
The letter yogh ( ; Middle English: ) was used in Middle English and Middle Scots, representing y () 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 *) 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 , , or — came into Old English spelling via Irish. It stood for and its various allophones — including and the voiced velar fricative — as well as the phoneme (y in modern English spelling). In Middle English, its form developed into yogh, which stood for the phoneme as in ' (night, then still pronounced as spelled: ). Sometimes, yogh stood for or , as in the word ' = yowling. 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 .
In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh is used to represent the voiced interdental fricative: , now written dhodho, pronounced .
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 . 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. __NOTOC__
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 "yean" and "yield")
- ("harboured")
List of modern Scottish proper names with representing <>
- Culzean - pronounced culain (IPA )
- Dalziel - pronounced deeyel (IPA ), from Gaelic Dail-gheal; also spelled Dalyell.
- Finzean - pronounced fingen (IPA )
- Glenzier - pronounced glinger (IPA )
- MacKenzie - originally pronounced makenyie (IPA ), from Gaelic MacCoinnich; now usually pronounced with /z/
- Menzies - most correctly pronounced mingis (IPA ), from Gaelic Mèinnearach; now controversially also pronounced with /z/
- Winzet - pronounced winyet (IPA )
- Zetland - the name for Shetland until the 1970s.
References
External links
- Michael Everson's essay "On the derivation of YOGH and EZH"
- BBC on the use of the letter in Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell's first name
"Yogh"