Typography Word of the Day: Yogh

It looks like a 3, but it isn’t…A “lost” letter, it recently made news

The yogh, in Lucida Grande

As the English language came forward from its Old and Middle English origins, evolution occurred. Some letters that were in common usage only three or four hundred years ago are all but unknown today.

A good example is the analphabetic glyph “yogh” (pronounced as the first syllable in the word “yogurt”). Bringhurst tells us that this letter is still used in the Lapp language, but was also used as part of the early English alphabet and therefore found in early Anglo-Saxon and English texts. One theory we’ve heard suggests that the “Y” in such cachet phrases as “Ye Olde Town Crier” or “Ye Old Curiosity Shoppe” was a modern corruption of the yogh, which, when current, carried the “th” sound; thus “ye” was properly pronounced “the”.

Another example is in proper names. The name “Menzies” is said to come from the more ancient form with the yogh in the z’s position, which corrupted, over time, into the letter z presumably due to its resemblance to the copperplate and cursive minuscule z. The current leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, a Sir Menzies Campbell, thus pronounces his name “Mingis”, and is sometimes referred to in the popular press as “Sir Ming” (credit the BBC).

Despite its resemblance to the numeral 3, it is not considered appropriate to substitute the numeral for the yogh symbol. The Unicode lookup for yogh in our copy of Lucida Grande for the majuscule is 0210C, and the minuscule is 0210D.