Greek diacritics

Common card · No. 206149

Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography (Greek: πολυτονικὸ σύστημα γραφῆς, romanized: polytonikò sýstīma grafī̂s), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography (μονοτονικό σύστημα γραφής, monotonikó sýstīma grafī́s), introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics. Polytonic orthography is the standard system for Ancient Greek and Medieval Greek and includes the three diacritics for different kinds of pitch accent: acute accent (´) circumflex accent (῀) grave accent (`) and the two diacritics for breathings: rough breathing (῾) indicates the presence of the /h/ sound before a letter smooth breathing (᾿) indicates the absence of /h/. Since in Modern Greek the pitch accent has been replaced by a dynamic accent (stress), and /h/ was lost, most polytonic diacritics have no phonetic significance, and merely reveal...

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