| Spiritus Lenis |
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The spiritus lenis ("smooth breathing" or "soft breathing") or '''psilon pneuma''' (Greek: psilón, ''ψιλόν'') is a , 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). Allen accordingly regards the glottal stop interpretation as "highly improbable". 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 Rho s. It did not occur on an initial Upsilon . 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 {Link without Title} while in others it was used for the vowel Eta . In medieval and modern script, it takes the form of a closing half moon (reverse C) or a closing single quotation mark:
It is part of the traditional Polytonic Orthography for Greek, but has been dropped in the modern Monotonic Orthography as the {Link without Title} sound has disappeared from Modern Greek . Psila 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+0486 or HTML entity ҆ ( ). SEE ALSO REFERENCES |