The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh

Summary

Portrait of St Mark, Lindisfarne Gospels (detail). Note the form of the ‘g’ in ‘imago leonis’ at the top…English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one. It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage).English spelling is so complex that we’ve made mastering it into a competitive sport: what would be the point of a spelling bee in a language with a predictable spelling system? Where’s the fun unless you have to sweat a little as you struggle to recall whether this particular word is one where “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’” doesn’t apply?In short, English has a complicated writing system.I’ve written about the origin of some of this complexity before, blaming everyone from the French to stingy printers and late medieval yuppies. But I’ve not yet plumbed the depths of this complexity. To do so, I will need to tell you the story of yogh, an obscure medieval letter whose rise and fall allows us to peer into this abyss.But like an Icelandic family saga, we begin not with the story of yogh, but with the story of its parent. So allow me to introduce you to the letter ‘g,’ which, as you’ll soon see, is a complicated letter in its own right, dating back to Old English.It starts with the shape of the letter. When modern editors print Old English today, they print nice, modern-looking ‘g’s — that is, the ones we use today, with an open or closed loop on the bottom, depending on the typeface.This modern form of ‘g’ is called the Carolingian ‘g.’ It had its origin in the Carolingian minuscule, the script used by the scribes of the Carolingian Renaissance, the great revival of learning which flourished in the vast realm of Charlemagne (reigned 768–814).But Old English scribes didn’t write their g-sounds with a Carolingian ‘g.’ The Old English letter ‘g’ was written in a form called the insular ‘g.’ Here’s what it looked like: ‘ᵹ.’ ...