Yogh
Encyclopedia
Middle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
and Older Scots
Older Scots
Older Scots refers to the following periods in the History of the Scots language* Pre-literary Scots to 1375* Early Scots to 1450* Middle Scots to 1700...
, representing y (/j/) and various velar
Velar consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
phonemes. It was derived from the Old English form of the letter g.
In Middle English writing, tailed z came to be indistinguishable from yogh.
In Middle Scots
Middle Scots
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 13th century its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually indistinguishable from early Northumbrian Middle English...
the character yogh became 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
Scots language
Scots is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster . It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language variety spoken in most of the western Highlands and in the Hebrides.Since there are no universally accepted...
words have a z in place of a yogh.
Yogh is shaped like the Arabic numeral
Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals or Hindu numerals or Hindu-Arabic numerals or Indo-Arabic numerals are the ten digits . They are descended from the Hindu-Arabic numeral system developed by Indian mathematicians, in which a sequence of digits such as "975" is read as a 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. In HTML, they are represented by Ȝ and ȝ.
Pronunciation
Yogh is pronounced either ˈjɒɡ, /ˈjɒx/, with a short o, or ˈjoʊɡ, /ˈjoʊk/, /ˈjoʊx/, with a long o. It stood for /ɡ/ and its various allophones—including [ɡ] and the voiced velar fricativeVoiced velar fricative
The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in various spoken languages. It is not found in English today, but did exist in Old English...
[ɣ]—as well as the phoneme /j/ (⟨y⟩ in modern English spelling).
In Middle English
Middle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
, it also stood for the phoneme /x/ as in ⟨⟩ ("night", then pronounced as spelled: [nixt]). Sometimes, Yogh stood for /j/ or /w/, as in the word ⟨⟩ [ˈjaʊlɪŋɡe], "yowling".
In Middle Scots
Middle Scots
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 13th century its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually indistinguishable from early Northumbrian Middle English...
, it represented the sound /j/ in the clusters /lj/, /ŋj/ and /nj/ written l and n. Yogh was also used for /j/ rather than y.
In medieval Cornish
Cornish language
Cornish is a Brythonic Celtic language and a recognised minority language of the United Kingdom. Along with Welsh and Breton, it is directly descended from the ancient British language spoken throughout much of Britain before the English language came to dominate...
manuscripts, Yogh was used to represent the voiced interdental fricative [ð], as in ⟨⟩, now written ⟨dhodho⟩, pronounced [ðoðo].
History
Old English
The original Germanic g sound was expressed by the GyfuGyfu
Gyfu is the name for the g-rune in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem, meaning "gift" or "generosity":The corresponding letter of the Gothic alphabet is g, called giba. The same rune also appears in the Elder Futhark, with a suggested Proto-Germanic name *gebô "gift". J. H...
rune in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc
Anglo-Saxon Futhorc
Futhorc , a runic alphabet used by the Anglo-Saxons, was descended from the Elder Futhark of 24 runes and contained between 26 and 33 characters. It was used probably from the fifth century onward, for recording Old English and Old Frisian....
(which is itself rendered as in modern transliteration
Runic transliteration and transcription
Runic transliteration and transcription are part of analysing a runic inscription which involves transliteration of the runes into Latin letters, transcription into a normalized spelling in the language of the inscription, and translation of the inscription into a modern language...
). Following palatalization, both gyfu and Latin g in Old English expressed the /j/ sound before front vowels. For example, "year" was written as gear, even though the word had never had a g sound (deriving from PIE
Pie
A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that covers or completely contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients....
*yōr-).
With the re-introduced possibility of a /g/ sound before front vowels, notably in the form of loanwords from the Old Norse
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
(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 glyph was simply the way Latin g
G
G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...
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
NormanNormans
The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
scribe
Scribe
A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...
s despised non-Latin characters
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
and certain spellings in English and therefore replaced the yogh with the digraph gh
Gh (digraph)
Gh is a digraph found in many languages.-English:In English, ⟨gh⟩ historically represented . In modern English, ⟨gh⟩ is almost always either silent or pronounced...
; still, the variety of pronunciations elaborated, as evidenced by cough, taught, 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
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, where the h makes the g hard (i.e., [ɡ] instead of [dʒ]); ghoul is Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, in which the gh was /ɣ/.
The medieval author Orm
Ormulum
The Ormulum or Orrmulum is a twelfth-century work of biblical exegesis, written by a monk named Orm and consisting of just under 19,000 lines of early Middle English verse...
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
Carolingian G
The Carolingian G or French G is one of two historical variants of the letter G which were in use in the Middle English alphabet; the other variant was the insular G or Irish G...
for /ɡ/.
Scots
In words of FrenchFrench language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and Gaelic origin, the Early Scots
Early Scots
Early Scots describes the emerging literary language of the Northern Middle English speaking parts of Scotland in the period before 1450. The northern forms of Middle English descended from Northumbrian Old English...
palatal consonant
Palatal consonant
Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...
/alatal nasal had become /nj/, /ŋj/ or in some cases /ŋj/, and the palatal consonant /alatal lateral approximant had become/lj/ by the Middle Scots period. Those were variously written , , or , and , or . By the Modern Scots
Modern Scots
Modern Scots describes the varieties of Scots traditionally spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster from 1700.Throughout its history, Modern Scots has been undergoing a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations of speakers have adopted more and more features from...
period the yogh had been replaced by the character z, in particular for /ŋj/, /nj/ (n) and /lj/ (l), written nz and lz.
The original /hj/ and /çj/ developed into /ʃ(j)/ in some words such as etland or Zetland for Shetland. Yogh was also used to represent /j/ in words such as , (yesterday) and but by the Modern Scots period y had replaced yogh.
After the development of printing
In Middle Scots orthography the use of yogh became confused with a cursive z and the early Scots printers often used z, when yogh was not available in their fonts.The glyph yogh can be found in surnames that start with Y in Scotland and Ireland, such as the surname Yeoman and sometimes letter z, spelled . Because the shape of the yogh was identical to some forms of the handwritten z.
In Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
1.0 the character yogh was mistakenly unified with the quite different character Ezh
Ezh (letter)
Ezh is a letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet , representing the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant. It is also called the "tailed z". Example: vision . It is pronounced as the "s" in "treasure" or the "si" in the word "precision"...
, and yogh itself was not added to Unicode until version 3.0.
List of words containing a yogh
These are Middle English words which contain the letter yogh in their spellings. All are obsolete.("night") ("eye
Eye
Eyes are organs that detect light and convert it into electro-chemical impulses in neurons. The simplest photoreceptors in conscious vision connect light to movement...
") ("yea") ("hallowed") ("gate
Gate
A gate is a point of entry to a space enclosed by walls, or a moderately sized opening in a fence. Gates may prevent or control entry or exit, or they may be merely decorative. Other terms for gate include yett and port...
") (past tense of "go", which in ME is often "yede"), (past participles of "yield" and "yean") ("harboured")
("ear
Ear
The ear is the organ that detects sound. It not only receives sound, but also aids in balance and body position. The ear is part of the auditory system....
") ("hastened") ("gift
Gift
A gift or a present is the transfer of something without the expectation of receiving something in return. Although gift-giving might involve an expectation of reciprocity, a gift is meant to be free. In many human societies, the act of mutually exchanging money, goods, etc. may contribute to...
") ("if") ("yes") ("yesterday") ("yester-") ("yet") ("give" or "if") ("wrote")
Scots words with representing <>
- Bunzion - pronounced bunion, Lower and Upper Bunzion are farms in the Parish of Cults, FifeFifeFife is a council area and former county of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries to Perth and Kinross and Clackmannanshire...
. - Capercailzie (from capall-coille, now normally spelt capercaillieCapercaillieThe Western Capercaillie , also known as the Wood Grouse, Heather Cock or Capercaillie , is the largest member of the grouse family, reaching over 100 cm in length and 6.7 kg in weight. The largest one ever recorded in captivity had a weight of 7.2 kg....
in English); - Culzean — culain (IPA /kʌˈleɪn/)
- DalzielDalzielDalziel, Dalzell or Dalyell is a Scottish Lowland surname. It is pronounced , though pronunciation with a may be heard outside Scotland.-Pronunciation:...
— pronounced deeyel (IPA /diːˈɛl/), from Gaelic Dail-gheal; also spelled Dalyell. - DrumelzierDrumelzierDrumelzier , is a village on the B712 in the Tweed Valley in the Scottish Borders.The area of the village is extensive and includes the settlements of Wrae, Stanhope, Mossfennan and Kingledoors. To the north is Broughton and to the south the road passes Crook Inn to Tweedsmuir.The Drumelzier or...
- pronounced "drumellier" (IPA /drʌˈmɛljɛr/), - FinzeanFinzeanFinzean is a rural community, electoral polling district, community council area and former ecclesiastical parish, which forms the southern part of the Parish of Birse, Aberdeenshire, Scotland...
— pronounced fingen (IPA /ˈfɪŋən/) - Funzie GirtFunzie Girt dykeFunzie Girt is an ancient dividing wall that was erected from north to south across the island of Fetlar in Scotland. Some sources describe it as having been built in the Neolithic, but the date of construction is not certainly known. The line of the wall, which ran for over , once divided the...
(IPA /ˈfɪnji ɡɪrt/) - gaberlunzieGaberlunzieGaberlunzie is a medieval Scots word for a licensed beggar. The name may derive from the wallet that such people carry, but there is no other known derivation. The word appears in several of Sir Walter Scott's books...
, a licensed beggar - GlenzierGlenzierGlenzier is a village in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland.-See also:*Scots dike and the Glenzier burn....
— pronounced glinger (IPA /ˈɡlɪŋər/) - LenzieLenzieLenzie is a small town by the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in the East Dunbartonshire council area of Scotland. It is about six miles north-east of Glasgow city centre and one mile south of Kirkintilloch. It has a population of about 10,000.-Name:...
— now pronounced "Len-zee", but previously "Lingee" - a village near Glasgow - MacKenzieMackenzie (surname)Mackenzie, MacKenzie, and McKenzie, are Scottish surnames. Originally pronounced in Scots, the z representing the old Middle Scots letter, yogh. The names are Anglicised forms of the Scottish Gaelic MacCoinnich, which is a patronymic form of the personal name Coinneach. The personal name means...
— originally pronounced makenyie (IPA /məˈkɛŋji/), from Gaelic MacCoinnich; now usually pronounced with /z/, though as late as 1946 George Black recorded the form with /j/ as standard - MenziesMenziesMenzies is a Scottish surname probably derived, like its Gaelic form Méinnearach, from the Norman name Mesnières.The name is historically pronounced , since the was a surrogate for the letter . Today it is often given its spelling pronunciation...
— most correctly pronounced mingis (IPA /ˈmɪŋɪs/), a variant of Manners, now controversially also pronounced with /z/ - WinzetNinian WinzetNinian Winzet was a polemical writer who was probably educated at the university of Glasgow.He was ordained priest in 1540, and in 1552 was appointed master of the grammar school of Linlithgow, from which town he was later "expellit and schott out" by the partisans of Dean Patrick Kinlochy,...
— pronounced winyet (IPA /ˈwɪnjət/) - RuchazieRuchazieRuchazie is a district in the Scottish city of Glasgow. It is situated to the North-East of the city close to Easterhouse. The area has experienced considerable re-generation and improvement in recent years thanks to Tower Homes LHO and Ruchazie Housing Association...
— a district of Glasgow - tuilzie, 'a fight'
- Zell - Archaic spelling of "Isle of Yell"
- Zetland — the name for Shetland until the 1970s. Shetland postcodesUK postcodesThe postal codes used in the United Kingdom are known as postcodes. They are alphanumeric and were introduced by the Royal Mail over a 15-year period from 11th October 1959 to 1974...
begin with the letters ZE.
The town of Hamilton, South Lanarkshire
Hamilton, South Lanarkshire
Hamilton is a town in South Lanarkshire, in the west-central Lowlands of Scotland. It serves as the main administrative centre of the South Lanarkshire council area. It is the fifth-biggest town in Scotland after Paisley, East Kilbride, Livingston and Cumbernauld...
, was previously called Cadzow; and the word Cadzow continues in modern use in many streetnames and other names, e.g. Cadzow Castle
Cadzow Castle
Cadzow Castle, now in ruins, was constructed between 1500 and 1550 on the site of an earlier royal castle, one mile south-east of the centre of Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, Scotland. The town of Hamilton was formerly known as Cadzow or Cadyou , until renamed in 1455 in honour of James Hamilton, 1st...
, Kilncadzow
Kilncadzow
Kilncadzow is a small village in rural South Lanarkshire, lying roughly 5km north of Lanark and 5km east-southeast of Carluke, on the A721 road. The name 'Kilncadzow' is pronounced locally as kill-caig-eh...
.
External links
- Michael EversonMichael EversonMichael Everson is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media...
's essay "On the derivation of YOGH and EZH" - BBC on the use of the letter in former Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell's first name