Nov. 20th, 2007

jere7my: muskrat skull (Default)
There's a Scottish dance called Drumelzier, pronounced droom-AL-yer. It seems counterintuitive to pronounce a Z as a Y, but previously I've thrown up my hands and blamed it on Those Crazy Gaels. Turns out, the Z is actually a Yogh (ȝ), a letter that looks like a 3, but is derived from the letter G and pronounced with the tongue back in the throat, much like Y.

A great deal of confusion arose over the distinction between Yogh, Blackletter (or German, or tailed) Z, and Ezh (ʒ, derived from the letter Z), extending up to the present day — even Unicode, prior to v3.0, did not distinguish between Yogh and Ezh. Once everyone forgot about Yogh, they interpreted the funny-looking character in Drumelȝier as a Z, and it's been typeset that way ever since.

I sort of wish they'd begun calling it Drumel3ier, but I may be biased.

(If the funny characters don't display in your browser, you can see them on the Wikipedia pages I linked to.)

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