Greek diacritics

History Diacritics and other symbols Related topics

• Use as scientific symbols
• Orthography
• Romanization
• Cyrillization

Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography (Greek: πολυτονικὸ σύστημα γραφῆς, romanized: polytonikò sýstÄ«ma grafÄ«Ì‚s), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography (μονοτονικό σύστημα γραφής, monotonikó sýstÄ«ma 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 (á¿€)
• 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Since in Modern Greek the pitch accent has been replaced by a dynamic accent (stress), and /h/ was lost, most polytonic diacritics have no phonetic significance, and merely reveal the underlying Ancient Greek etymology.

Monotonic orthography is the standard system for Modern Greek. It retains two diacritics:

• single accent or tonos (΄) that indicates stress, and
• diaeresis (¨), which usually indicates a hiatus but occasionally indicates a diphthong

Although it is not a diacritic, the hypodiastole has in a similar way the function of a sound-changing diacritic in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι (ó,ti, 'whatever') from ότι (óti, 'that'). Although the comma is used for the hypodiastole in modern Greek, they originally arose as separate punctuation marks in the Byzantine manuscript tradition, where the same Greek term was more typically rendered ὅ⸒τι.