Yogh is a letter used in Middle English and Middle Scots, representing y (IPA ) 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 Scottish names and Scots words have a z in place of an historic yogh, for example, Dalzell (< Dail-gheal), MacKenzie (< MacCoinnich), Menzies [miŋgis] (< Mèinnearach), gaberlunzie, 'a licensed beggar', tulzie, 'a fight'.

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 character yogh — pronounced either /joʊk/, /joʊg/, /joʊ/ or /joʊx/ — came into Old English spelling via Irish. It stood for [g] and its various allophones — including the velar fricative [ɣ] (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 niȝt (night, then still pronounced as spelled: /nixt/ [ˈnɪçt]). Sometimes, yogh stood for [j] or [w], as in the word ȝoȝelinge /ˈjaʊlɪŋge/ = yowling. In the late Middle English period, yogh was no longer used: niȝt came to be spelled night. Middle English used the French g for [g].

In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh is used to represent the 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. But 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.

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 3.0.

External links

• Michael Everson's essay "On the derivation of YOGH and EZH"