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Concept
Rough breathing
Summary
In the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing (dasỳ pneûma or δασεῖα daseîa; spīritus asper) character is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an h sound before a vowel, diphthong, or after rho. It remained in the polytonic orthography even after the Hellenistic period, when the sound disappeared from the Greek language. In the monotonic orthography of Modern Greek phonology, in use since 1982, it is not used at all.
The absence of an /h/ sound is marked by the smooth breathing.
The character, or those with similar shape such as , have also been used for a similar sound by Thomas Wade (and others) in the Wade–Giles system of romanization for Mandarin Chinese. Herbert Giles and others have used a left (opening) curved single quotation mark for the same purpose; the apostrophe, backtick, and visually similar characters are often seen as well.
The rough breathing comes from the left-hand half of the letter H. In some archaic Greek alphabets, the letter was used for h (Heta), and this usage survives in the Latin letter H. In other dialects, it was used for the vowel ɛː (Eta), and this usage survives in the modern system of writing Ancient Greek, and in Modern Greek.
The rough breathing ( ̔ ) is placed over an initial vowel, or over the second vowel of an initial diphthong.
αἵρεσις haíresis 'choice' (→ Latin haeresis → English heresy)
ἥρως hḗrōs 'hero'
An upsilon or rho at the beginning of a word always takes a rough breathing.
ὕμνος hýmnos 'hymn'
ῥυθμός rhythmós 'rhythm'
In some writing conventions, the rough breathing is written on the second of two rhos in the middle of a word. This is transliterated as rrh in Latin.
διάῤῥοια diárrhoia 'diarrhoea'
In crasis (contraction of two words), when the second word has a rough breathing, the contracted vowel does not take a rough breathing. Instead, the consonant before the contracted vowel changes to the aspirated equivalent (i.e., π → φ, τ → θ, κ → χ), if possible, and the contracted vowel takes the apostrophe or coronis (identical to the smooth breathing).
Official source
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