Ancient Greek Grammar - Diacritics

Diacritics

The Classical Greek script did not use accents. Accents were devised in the Hellenistic era by scholars who wanted to make it easier for foreigners to learn Greek. The general use of these accents began during the Byzantine Empire. Modern Greek has used only two diacritics since 1982, namely the diaeresis and the acute.

The Ancient Greek script has seven diacritics (two breathings, three accents, a trema, and the hypogegrammene):

• Rough breathing (Greek: δασεῖα, Latin: spiritus asper) (῾), written over a vowel letter, denotes the sound /h/ at the beginning of a word, preceding the vowel. The smooth breathing (Greek: ψιλή, Latin: spiritus lenis) (᾿) denotes the absence of the /h/ sound. The vowel υ always has the spiritus asper, while other vowels can occur with either of the two. The spiritus asper is also conventionally written over a word-initial ρ.