Yogurt

Yogurt (pronounced yo-gurt, yog-urt or yog-utt)

(1) A milk-based product stiffened by a bacterium-aided curdling process, and sometimes mixed with fruit or other flavoring.

(2) Any similar product based on other substances (used very loosely except in jurisdictions with prescriptive legislation).

1620s: From the Ottoman Turkish یوغورت‎ (yoğurt) (yogurt).  Deconstructions of the original Turkish suggest the root yog meant something like “to condense” and was related to yoğun (thickened; intense), yogush (liquify (of water vapor)), yogur (knead) & yoğurmak (to knead; to be curdled or coagulated; to thicken) and there are similar words in other languages including the Welsh iogwrt (yogurt).  Yogurt is a noun; the noun plural is yogurts.

In the English speaking word there’s the usual Atlantic divide, yog-urt the usual pronunciation in the UK whereas in the US it tends to be yo-gurt.  This is mirrored by the various spellings and they in turn influence the regional differences in pronunciation.  In the UK, the usual spelling is yoghurt (although some imported product is different) while in the US it’s nearly always is yogurt.  In the far-flung outposts of the linguistic empire (Australia, New Zealand and South Africa), both spellings are found.  Canada (influenced by the UK because of the imperial legacy, the US because of proximity and France because of the special position of the province of Quebec) uses both the common spellings and has its own, unique blend (yogourt), a variant of the French yaourt.

Lindsay Lohan eating yogurt, Los Angeles, 2009.

The origin of the UK’s spelling (yoghurt) is said by etymologists to date from a mispronunciation of the Turkish from which the dairy treat came.  The sound ğ was in the early seventeenth century rendered as gh in transliterations of Turkish (the “g” a "soft" sound, in many dialects and closer to an English "w").  Across the channel, the French universally say yaourt, thus exactly following the spelling so while the English got the “g” wrong in transliteration, the French don’t pronounce the “g” at all and that appears to be the closest to the original.  The French pronunciation pays tribute to the Turkish letter “ğ” (yumuşak ge (a “g” with a squiggle)) which in Turkish is silent, the squiggle denoting only that the length of the preceding vowel should be lengthened.  The linguistic theory is that France being geographically closer to Asia Minor (the land mass which encompasses most of the modern Republic of Türkiye), yogurt must have been introduced by Turkish traders who demonstrated the correct pronunciation whereas the more remote English and Scandinavians received their yogurt by ship and had only the spelling with which to work.  They did their usual phonetic thing and the variations are with us to this day.