The spiritus lenis ("smooth breathing" or "soft breathing"), in Greek psilon pneuma or psilí, (ψιλή), is a diacritical mark used in the polytonic orthography. A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation History An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels. The double acute accent ( ˝) is a Diacritic mark of the Latin script used primarily in written Hungarian. Pitch The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it occurred only on the last syllable of a word in cases where the See also Grave accent Double acute accent International Phonetic Alphabet Length The breve sign indicates a short vowel as opposed to the Macron  ¯ which indicates long vowels in academic transcription Names Usage differs as to the name of this diacritic In the field of typography the term "caron" seems to be more popular Pitch The circumflex accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it occurred (subject to certain rules on the accented syllable Diaeresis or trema See also Diaeresis History Historically the diaeresis mark or trema is far older than the umlaut mark Overdot See also Anusvara Language scripts or transcription schemes that use the dot above a letter as a diacritical mark In Arabic romanization Anusvara (Dev अनुस्वार anusvāra) is the diacritic used to mark a type of Nasalization used in a number of Indic languages. Anusvara (Dev अनुस्वार anusvāra) is the diacritic used to mark a type of Nasalization used in a number of Indic languages. This article is about chandrabindu the character in several Brahmi derived scripts See also Horn (diacritic Ɓ ɓ Ƈ ƈ Ɗ ɗ Ɠ ɠ See also Ơ Ư Hook (diacritic Acute accent Apostrophe A macron, from Greek el μακρόv ( makrón) meaning "long" is a Diacritic ¯ placed over or under a Vowel which was originally The ogonek ( Polish for "little tail" the Diminutive of ogon) is a Diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the A ring Diacritic may appear above or below letters It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts The spiritus asper ( Latin for "rough breathing" δασὺ πνεῦμα dasỳ pneûma or daseîa) is a diacritical mark used in A bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a Grapheme. A comma ( ,   is a Punctuation mark It has the same shape as an Apostrophe or single closing Quotation mark in many typefaces but it differs A hyphen ( -) is a Punctuation mark It is used for both Words to join and to separate Syllables It is often confused with the dashes The tilde (~ (/ˈtɪldə/ is a Grapheme with several uses The name of the character comes from Spanish, from the Latin titulus Titlo is an extended Diacritic symbol first used in Old Cyrillic manuscripts e Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation In Ancient Greek, it indicates the absence of initial aspiration: in other words, that the word does not begin with an [h] sound. The Ancient Greek language is the historical stage in the development of the Hellenic language family spanning the Archaic (c Some authorities have interpreted it as representing a glottal stop, but a final vowel at the end of a word is regularly elided where the following word starts with a vowel, which would not happen if the second word began with a glottal stop (or any form of stop consonant). This article is about the sound in spoken language For the letter see Glottal stop (letter. Allen accordingly regards the glottal stop interpretation as "highly improbable". ^[1]

The spiritus lenis was kept in the traditional polytonic orthography even after the /h/ sound had disappeared from the language in Hellenistic times. Koine Greek is phonologically a transition period at the start of the period the language was generally virtually identical to Classical Ancient Greek, whereas in It has been dropped in the modern monotonic orthography.

The spiritus lenis is written as on top of, or to the left of, an initial vowel (the second vowel of a pair comprising a diphthong), and also in certain editions on the first of a pair of rhos. In Phonetics, a vowel is a Sound in spoken Language, such as English ah! or oh!, pronounced with an open Vocal tract It did not occur on an initial upsilon. Upsilon (uppercase &Upsilon, lowercase υ Ύψιλον is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet.

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 an [h] while in others it was used for the vowel eta. Eta (uppercase &Eta, lowercase η Ήτα) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet. In medieval and modern script, it takes the form of a closing half moon (reverse C) or a closing single quotation mark:

Psila pneumata were also used in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets when writing the Old Church Slavonic language. The original Cyrillic alphabet was a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century to write the Old Church Slavonic Liturgical The Glagolitic alphabet or Glagolitsa is the oldest known Slavic Alphabet. to make sure old Cyrillic letters are displayed properly (For example instead of just Ѣ write Ѣ 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. Church Slavonic (also Church Slavic, Old Bulgarian) is the Liturgical language of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Macedonian Orthodox From the Russian writing system, it was eliminated by Peter the Great during his alphabet and font-style reform (1707). The modern Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet. All other Cyrillic-based modern writing systems are based on the Petrine script, so they have never had the psili.

In Unicode, spiritus lenis is encoded at U+1FBF ( ᾿ ) for Greek writing system and U+0486 ( ◌҆ ) in Cyrillic. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's

See also

• ʾ
• Spiritus asper
• Polytonic orthography

References