Gnomon's Guide

The alphabet of 26 letters that we're familiar with wasn't always as it is now. In the Middle Ages, the English alphabet included a letter known as 'Yogh'. It looked like a 3 or a script lower-case Z: a backwards c with a tail on it. If your browser is compatible, you should be able to see one just above this paragraph. If not, you can see a picture of a yogh on this page.

Pronunciation

Yogh was pronounced with a sort of guttural sound which we don't get in modern English but is quite common in some other languages: if you can say the ch sound that you get in the Scottish word loch or the German word acht, then you're half way to saying a yogh. Put your throat into the position of a ch, and say a g. You'll get a guttural sound which is the voiced version of the ch sound. The same sound occurs at the start of the Irish word 'dhuit' in the phrase 'Dia dhuit' (the normal phrase in Irish for 'hello'). In Modern Greek, it is the sound of the letter ghamma before any broad vowel.

Yogh was also sometimes pronounced as a consonantal y - that's the y sound at the start of the word yellow, not the y in fly.

The Suppression

The Normans didn't like the letter yogh, because it wasn't used in French, so they didn't recognise it. They tried to stamp it out by using the combination 'gh' instead of yogh. This combination occurs in many different words: plough, night, cough etc. These would all originally have been pronounced with a throaty gh.

In places where the yogh continued to be pronounced, it continued to be used as well, so yogh survived in Scotland after it had been forgotten in other places. When printing arrived, the fount designers didn't bother producing a yogh, so the Scottish made do with using the letter z instead, a letter which does not occur much in Scottish. Many Scottish words with a yogh started to be spelt with a z, but it was understood this was still to be pronounced with the throaty gh sound. This explains why the Scots name Menzies should be pronounced Menghies.

Eventually yogh disappeared - nobody knew what it was. It had got completely replaced by gh in English and by z in certain Scottish words.

The Resurrection

These days, the Unicode character set has room in it for thousands of different characters, so every character who is any character has found a place in it. You'll find yogh at Unicode position 21C, although whether you can find a browser to display it is a different question.

... and that's the Story of Yogh!