Spiritus asper
The
spiritus asper ("rough breathing"),
dasy pneuma (Greek: dasu,
δασύ) or
dasia (Greek: ''δασεῖα) , is a
diacritical mark used in
Greek. It indicates an initial aspiration: in other words that the word began with an [h] sound in
Ancient Greek.
The origin of the sign is thought to be the left-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. In medieval and modern script, It 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 on an initial
rho or the second of a pair of rhos. It takes the form of an opening half moon (C) or an opening single quotation mark:
*
;
*
.
The only situations when it can be written inside a word are :
* on a double
rho in certain editions;
* when it represents a
coronis resulting from a
crasis implying a vowel bearing a
spiritus asper.
The
spiritus asper merely notes the presence of an initial consonant [h], which cannot be written otherwise when it is not initial: thus stands for
humnos, "hymn", and for
hr"tōr (or
rh"tōr), "orator".
When a word begins by an initial
grapheme which is a vowel not preceded by an [h], the
spiritus lenis ("soft breathing") is employed.
It is part of the traditional
polytonic orthography for Greek, but has been dropped in the modern
monotonic orthography as the [h] sound has disappeared from
Modern Greek.
Dasea pneumata were also used in the
early Cyrillic alphabet when writing the
Old Church Slavonic language. In this context it is encoded as
Unicode U+0485 or
HTML entity ҅ ( ).
*
Spiritus lenis*
Polytonic orthography
