Insular G

Shape of Insular G

Shape of Carolingian G.

Insular G (font: Ᵹ ᵹ; image: ) is a form of the letter g used in Insular fonts somewhat resembling a tailed z or lowercase delta, used in Great 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.

Letter

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 g is one of several insular letters encoded into Unicode but few fonts will display all of these symbols although some will display the lowercase insular g (ᵹ) and the tironian et (⁊). Two fonts that support the other characters are Junicode and Tehuti.

The relationship between different fonts, showing the development of the minuscule.

Insular letters in Unicode[1][2]

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

U+1ACx

◌ᫌ

◌ᫍ

◌ᫎ

U+1D7x

ᵹ

U+1DDx

◌ᷘ

U+204x

⁊

U+2E5x

⹒

U+A77x

Ꝺ

ꝺ

Ꝼ

ꝼ

Ᵹ

Ꝿ

ꝿ

U+A78x

Ꞃ

ꞃ

Ꞅ

ꞅ

Ꞇ

ꞇ

U+A7Dx

Ꟑ

ꟑ

Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 16.0 2.^ These characters are spread across the following Unicode blocks: Combining Diacritical Marks Extended (U+1AB0–U+1AFF), Phonetic Extensions (U+1D00–U+1D7F), Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (U+1DC0–U+1DFF), General Punctuation (U+2000–U+206F), Supplemental Punctuation (U+2E00-U+2E7F), and Latin Extended-D (U+A720–U+A7FF)

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.