Yogh Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
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 on-line reference works. It would seem 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 [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/.
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: e.g., spaghetti is Italian, where the h makes the g hard; ghoul is Arabic, in which the gh was the velar fricative mentioned above; ghost is Dutch - from the standpoint of English, the Dutch confuse the letters g and h, so here's a spelling pronounceable in both.
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 3.0.