Etymologie, Etimología, Étymologie, Etimologia, Etymology, (griech.) etymología, (lat.) etymologia, (esper.) etimologio
IE Irland, Irlanda, Irlande, Irlanda, Ireland, (esper.) Irlando
Zeichen, Signo, Signe, Segno, Sign, (esper.) signoj

EZH, YOGH (W3)

Title: On the derivation of YOGH and EZH
Source: Michael Everson
Status: Irish national position
Action: Consideration by WG2 and UTC

This document is a response to e-mail discussion of my previous document, "Reminder about 4 medieval English Latin characters", in which it was proposed that the letter "YOGH" be added to ISO/IEC 10646 because the unification of "YOGH" and "EZH" was in error. There is a fair bit of the e-mail discussion quoted here. Ken Whistler disagreed, citing Pullum and Ladusaw's Phonetic Symbol Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978):

This Old Irish form of "g" was used in Old English orthography to represent, at various times, a voiced velar stop, a voiced velar fricative, and a palatal approximant. It survived into Middle English with the latter two values in the form <3> and called "yogh". It is sometimes found set as <3> (cf. Jones 1972). The letter was used in Scotland later than in England and English printers perceived a similarity between the <3> and a form of "z" and substituted the latter. This led, according to Jespersen (1949, 22), to the current spelling pronunciation of Scottish names like "Mackenzie". The character occurs in this form with this value in Isaac Pitman's 1845 Phonotypic alphabet (cf. Pitman and St. John 1969, 82).

It can be noted in passing that the glyph Pullum and Ladusaw use for the round-headed "YOGH", "3", is too much like a number "3" for my tastes. Good typography, such as that employed by the Oxford University Press and the Early English Text Society, prefers a rather unique glyph, "?", which looks even less z-like than does.

It is my contention that Pullum & Ladusaw have made an incorrect analysis.
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