Writing English

Yogh

[Hagstrom]

English is the lingua franca of the Internet, so I thought it best to put some English pages on my site. Unfortunately I have a few problems with some of the English letters.

Instead of ash I'll just use the Danish/Norwegian æ - since they look the same - and I'll use the Icelandic thorn and eth.

But how do I render the yogh?
My best attempt is to take the number 3 and "twist" it, like this:

<style>
span.yogh {font-style: italic ; font-size: larger; vertical-align:-15% ;font-family: Times New Roman }
</style>
<span class="yogh">3</span>owre

It looks terribly on Netscape (surprise, surprise). Is there a better way?

[Eric_Jarvis]

I'd work in utf-8, which will give you all the characters you need...it's generally the safest bet when doing anything multilingual...you may also want to use <span lang="is"> in strategic places

[ergophobe]

yogh is a special case of sorts. It was incorrectly identified and not added to the unicode standard until Unicode 4.0.

Some pages that might interest you

Alan Wood has all the relevant characters together nicely on one page, including yogh
[alanwood.net...]

Other references

[en.wikipedia.org...]

This one is on a "news" page so I'm not sure the URL will be stable.

[digitalmedievalist.com...]

Sunday, February 01, 2004
I want my Yogh

Unfortunately, there is no yogh in Unicode. There should be; the other Medieval English characters are represented in Unicode. I'm not sure why there isn't yogh, but there's a very good discussion of why there should be a yogh in Unicode by Michael Everson.

...you can see some of the efforts others dealing with manuscripts on the web have had to make...substituting other characters for the yogh. This sort of substitution is really not a long-term solution.

Sunday, February 08, 2004
More on the Yogh

I've managed to learn that Unicode 4.0 Latin Extended B does indeed have both an upper and a lower case yogh, a yogh is that not an ezh. Take a look, if your browser supports Unicode 4.0 characters: an uppercase yogh &#540; or U+021C and a lower case yogh &#541; or U+021D.

I have hopes for true Unicode support in Microsoft Word 11. My ultimate plan is to create a custom keyboard layout, so I can easily access the characters I need.

[edited by: tedster at 6:57 pm (utc) on Mar. 24, 2004]
[edit reason] shorten the quotes [/edit]

[ergophobe]

One more excellent page

[fileformat.info...]

all the encoding info you could want for this character. I should add, however, that the browser test page failed miserably in IE6, Firefox .8, and Opera 7. I think you may need to use an image.

Yogh is decimal 541 as an html entity: &#541;

and hex 21d: &#x21d;

[Hagstrom]

Thanks for all the links.

I had found a page with a working yogh: [web.uvic.ca...] It looks good to me, but I'm not sure if Unicodes are "industrial strength".

On the other hand I already use Unicode for macrons / macra...

[ergophobe]

Technically, that page is using an ezh rather than a yogh, but I'm sure it's as close as you're going to get, since yogh doesn't work even in the most recent browsers.

By the way, I did find the toungue-in-cheek opening to this thread amusing. How did it start? Since English is the lingua franca of the web, you decided to put up some pages in English and therefore need characters like thorn and yogh. Who's going to read you pages, Chaucer?

Tom

[Hagstrom]

By the way, I did find the toungue-in-cheek opening to this thread amusing.

I'm glad you caught it :)
"lingua franca" is Latin for "the French language /tongue" - so I really had a French tongue-in-cheek when using Latin to describe the universality of the English language. LOL :)