The letter yogh (ȝogh) ( ; Scots: ; Middle English: ) was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing y () and various velar phonemes. It was derived from the Insular form of the letter g. 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 (pronounced mingis). Yogh is shaped similarly to the Arabic numeral 3, which is sometimes substituted for the character in online reference works. There is some confusion about the letter in the literature, as the English language was far from standardised at the time. Capital is represented in Unicode by code point , and lower case by code point . Pronunciation In Modern English yogh is pronounced , , using short o or , , , using long o. It stood for and its various allophones—including and the voiced velar fricative —as well as the phoneme ( in modern English orthography). In Middle English, it also stood for the phoneme and its allophone [ç] as in ("night", in an early Middle English way still often pronounced as spelled so: ). Sometimes, yogh stood for or , as in the word , "yowling". In Middle Scots, it represented the sound in the clusters , and written l and n. Yogh was generally used for rather than y. In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh was used to represent the voiced dental fricative , as in its , now written , pronounced . History Old English The original Germanic g sound was expressed by the gyfu rune in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc (which is itself sometimes rendered as in modern transliteration). Following palatalization, both gyfu and Latin g in Old English expressed the sound before front vowels. For example, "year" was written as gear, even though the word had never had a g sound (deriving from Proto-Germanic *jērą). With the re-introduced possibility of a sound before front vowels, notably in the form of loanwords from the Old Norse (such as gere from Norse gervi, Modern English gear), this orthographical state of affairs became a source for confusion, and a distinction of "real g" () from "palatalized g" () became