Yogh
The letter yogh (uppercase: Ȝ, lowercase: ȝ; Scots: yoch; Middle English: ȝogh) is a Latin script letter that was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing y (/j/) and various velar phonemes. It descends from the Insular G, the form of the letter g in the medieval Insular script, ᵹ.
In Middle English writing, tailed z came to be indistinguishable from yogh.
In Middle Scots, the character yogh became confused with a cursive z and the early Scots printers often used z when yogh was not available in their fonts. Consequently, some Modern Scots words have a z in place of a yogh—the common surname Menzies was originally written Menȝies (nowadays pronounced mingis but originally menyers, from the French menieres).
Yogh is shaped similarly to the Cyrillic letter З and the Arabic numeral 3, which are sometimes substituted for the character in online reference works. There is some confusion about the letter in the literature, as the English language was not standardised at the time. Capital yogh is represented in Unicode by code point U+021C Ȝ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER YOGH, and lower case yogh by code point U+021D ȝ LATIN SMALL LETTER YOGH.
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