Editing Yogh (section)

===Middle English===
In the 14th century, the [[Gh (digraph)|digraph ''gh'']] arose as an alternative to yogh for /x/, and eventually overtook yogh in popularity; still, the variety of pronunciations persisted, as evidenced by ''cough'', ''taught'', and ''though''.{{clarify|date=August 2023}}<!--Did these words really have different pronunciations at the time when they were realisations of /x/, which is what the sentence talks about? Didn't they all have [x]? And saying that they 'persisted' sounds odd, since the identical pronunciation as [x] is the older situation and the difference is what is new.--> The process of replacing the yogh with ''gh'' was slow, and was not completed until the arrival of printing presses (which lacked yogh) in England around the end of the fifteenth century. Not every English word that contains a ''gh'' was originally spelled with a yogh: for example, ''spaghetti'' is [[Italian language|Italian]], where the ''h'' makes the ''g'' hard (i.e., {{IPA|[ɡ]}} instead of {{IPA|[dʒ]}}); ''ghoul'' is [[Arabic]], in which the ''gh'' was {{IPA|/ɣ/}}.

The medieval author [[Ormulum|Orm]] used this letter in three ways when writing Early Middle English. By itself, it represented {{IPA|/j/}}, so he used this letter for the ''y'' in "yet". Doubled, it represented {{IPA|/i/}}, so he ended his spelling of "may" with two yoghs. Finally, the digraph of ''ȝh'' represented {{IPA|/ɣ/}}.<ref>{{cite book | last = Crystal | first = David | author-link = David Crystal | title = The Stories of English | date = 2004-09-09 | publisher = Overlook Press | location = New York | isbn = 1-58567-601-2 | page = [https://archive.org/details/storiesofenglish00crys/page/197 197] | url-access = registration | url = https://archive.org/details/storiesofenglish00crys/page/197 }}</ref>

In the late Middle English period, yogh was [[Middle English#Alphabet|no longer used]]: {{lang|ang|niȝt}} came to be spelled ''night''. Middle English re-imported [[Carolingian G|G in its French form]] for {{IPA|/ɡ/}} (As a further side note, [[French language|French]] also used  {{angle bracket|y}} to represent {{IPA|/j/}} in words like ''voyage'' and ''yeux'').