Smooth breathing
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Ἀ | ἀ |
Ἐ | ἐ |
Ἠ | ἠ |
Ἰ | ἰ |
Ὀ | ὀ |
ὐ | |
Ὠ | ὠ |
ῤ |
The smooth breathing (Ancient Greek:
Some authorities have interpreted it as representing a glottal stop, but a final vowel at the end of a word is regularly elided (removed) when the following word starts with a vowel and elision would not happen if the second word began with a glottal stop (or any other form of stop consonant). In his Vox Graeca, W. Sidney Allen accordingly regards the glottal stop interpretation as "highly improbable".[1]
The smooth breathing ( ᾿ ) is written as on top of one initial vowel, on top of the second vowel of a diphthong or to the left of a capital and also, in certain editions, on the first of a pair of rhos. It did not occur on an initial upsilon, which always has rough breathing (thus the early name ὕ hy, rather than ὔ y).
The smooth breathing was kept in the traditional polytonic orthography even after the /h/ sound had disappeared from the language in Hellenistic times. It has been dropped in the modern monotonic orthography.
Contents
History[edit]
The origin of the sign is thought to be the right-hand half ( ┤ ) of the letter H, which was used in some Greek dialects as [h] while in others it was used for the vowel eta. In medieval and modern script, it takes the form of a closing half moon (reverse C) or a closing single quotation mark:
- ἀ
- Ἀ
Smooth breathings were also used in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets when writing the Old Church Slavonic language. Today it is used in Church Slavonic according to a simple rule: if a word starts with a vowel, the vowel has a psili over it. From the Russian writing system, it was eliminated by Peter the Great during his alphabet and font-style reform (1707). All other Cyrillic-based modern writing systems are based on the Petrine script, so they have never had the smooth breathing.
Coronis[edit]
The coronis (κορωνίς, korōnís, "crow's beak" or "bent mark"), the symbol written over a vowel contracted by crasis,[3] was originally[when?] an apostrophe after the letter:
Unicode[edit]
In Unicode, the code points assigned to the smooth breathing are U+0313 ◌̓ COMBINING COMMA ABOVE for Greek and U+0486 ◌҆ COMBINING CYRILLIC PSILI PNEUMATA for Cyrillic. The pair of space + spiritus lenis is U+1FBF ◌᾿ GREEK PSILI. The coronis is assigned two distinct code points, U+1FBD ᾽ GREEK KORONIS and U+0343 ◌̓ COMBINING GREEK KORONIS.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ W. Sidney Allen (1968–74). Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-20626-X.
- ^ "crasis". Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. September 2005. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ Note on terminology:
Crasis in English usually refers to merging of words, but the sense of the word in the original Greek used to be more general,[2] referring to most changes related to vowel contraction, including synaeresis, though this is no longer the case.