Insular G

Insular G (Ᵹ ᵹ; image: ) is a form of the letter g somewhat resembling a tailed z or lowercase delta, used in Britain and Ireland. It was first used by the Irish, passed into Old English, and developed into the Middle English letter yogh (Ȝ ȝ). Middle English, having re-borrowed the familiar Carolingian g from the Continent, thus used two forms of g as separate letters.

The lowercase insular g (ᵹ) was used in Irish linguistics as a phonetic character for [ɣ], and on this basis is encoded in the Phonetic Extensions block of Unicode 4.1 (March 2005) as U+1D79. Its capital (Ᵹ) was introduced in Unicode 5.1 (April 2008) at U+A77D.

The insular form of g is still used in traditional Gaelic script.

See also

• Gaelic script
• Insular script
• Yogh

External links

• Drawing an insular G (here mistaken for yogh)
• Michael Everson's article On the derivation of YOGH and EZH shows insular g in several typefaces.

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646