Yogh is a letter used in Middle English and Middle Scots , 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. Some Scottish names and Scots language words have a z in place of an historic yogh, for example, Dalzell, MacKenzie, Menzies, capercailzie, 'a type of bird', gaberlunzie, 'a licensed beggar', tulzie, 'a fight'.Yogh is shaped like the Arabic numeral 3, which is sometimes substituted for the character in on-line 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 [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 = /'jowelinge/ = 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.
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English language
Middle English language
Uncommon Latin letters
