I recently came across a book giving a side by side comparison of various early translations of the Bible in to English. The earliest of these was the Wiclif (Wycliffe) Bible. One thing I noticed was the apparent use of the letter ȝ ("yogh") which was (is?) used in Lowlands Scots for a "y" sound (technically /j/) and is now written with a "z" glyph - hence the pronounciation of words like "Menzies", which is pronounced "Mingyis".
The copy I photographed is obviously a modern typescript version. I've had a look for images of an original, but some of those out there which are claimed to be from the Wiclif Bible are obviously from a later translation, and I can't read the ones which seem to be earlier. Can anyone confirm that yogh was used in Middle English orthography? If so, why did it survive in Scots and not in English?
It was indeed used in Middle English, including, as your edition shows, in Wycliffe's Bible. It's quite infrequent, as Anglo-Norman scribes rarely used non-standard latin characters, and it slowly disappeared. It was not exactly replaced by a tailed z (ʒ) like in Middle Scots, but by different letters or combinations of letters that reflected its actual pronounciation. It is however sometimes printed as ʒ in editions of works that have it, like in your example, especially if the printer cannot use the ȝ: both characters were actually unified in Unicode 1.0.
An example would be the Pearl-Manuscript: it's used in 'wroȝt' at the end of the third line in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In their edition, Ad Putter and Myra Stokes modernise it as 'wroght', and nowadays, you would translate it to 'wrought'.
