Information AboutYogh |
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The letter yogh ( ; 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 {Link without Title} ) 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 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. 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. The glyph Yogh can be found in surnames that start with Y in Scotland and Ireland, such as the surname Yeoman and sometimes spelled Yoghman. 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''. List of modern Scottish proper names with
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