|
Yogh is a letter used in Middle English,
representing y (SAMPA /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 (SAMPA /N/) in hang.
Yogh is shaped like the Arabic numeral 3, which is sometimes substituted for the character in online reference works. It would
seem there is some confusion about the letter in the literature. The character yogh - pronounced either [joUk], [joUg], [joU] or
[joUx] - came into Old English spelling via Irish. It stood for /g/ and its various allophones - including the velar
fricative [G] (voiced [x]) and [g] - as well as the phoneme /j/ (y in modern English spelling). In Middle English, yogh stood for
the phoneme /x/ as in ni3t (night, then still pronounced as spelled: /nixt/ ['nIçt]). Sometimes, yogh stood for /j/ or
/w/, e.g. in the word 3o3elinge = /'joweliŋge/ = yowling. In the late Middle English period, yogh was no longer
used: ni3t came to be spelled night. Middle English used the French g for /g/.
Please note that in the above Yoghs have been represented with the numeral "3". The actual Unicode entities for Yogh are Ȝ and ȝ, which display in your user agent as Ȝ and ȝ.
In Unicode 1.0 the character Yogh was mistakenly unified with the quite different character Ezh (Ʒ/ʒ), and Yogh was not correctly added to Unicode until Unicode 4.0.
External link
|