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represent aspects of Ancient Greek pronunciation. It was the standard orthography for all varieties of Greek from Hellenistic times until 1982, although the distinctions it represented had disappeared from the spoken language early in the Christian era. In 1982, the Greek Parliament adopted Monotonic Orthography . Polytonic is still sometimes used by traditionalists, who consider monotonic an unfortunate break with a continuous tradition. Polytonic Greek utilizes a set of Diacritic s on certain letters, illustrated below using the letter α:
All of these diacritics are important in Classical Greek (and the breathings in particular are relevant to the Etymology of words in other languages), but have no significance in the modern language. (Note that the transliteration of the names of the diacritics into the Roman Alphabet varies, chiefly depending on whether they are considered words from Classical or Modern Greek.) There have been problems in representing polytonic Greek on computers, and in displaying polytonic Greek on computer screens and printouts, but these have largely been overcome by the advent of Unicode and appropriate Fonts . While the ''tonos'' of monotonic orthography looks similar to the ''oxia'' of polytonic orthography in most fonts, Unicode has separate symbols for letters with these diacritics. For example, the monotonic "Greek small letter alpha with tonos" is at U+03AC, while the polytonic "Greek small letter alpha with oxia" is at U+1F71. HISTORY The rough and smooth breathings were introduced in classical times in order to represent the presence or absence of in Attic Greek, which had adopted a form of the alphabet in which the H sign was no longer available for this purpose as it had been used (as Eta ) for the long e. The various accents were introduced during the Hellenistic period and they were widely adopter at around 850 A.D. In the later development of the language, the ancient tones were replaced by a Stress Accent making the different accents superfluous, and the [h sound became silent. Some textbooks of Ancient Greek for foreigners have retained the breathings, but dropped all the accents, simplifying the task for the learner, but breaking the link with the modern language. Following the final adoption of the Demotic ( Dhimotiki ) form of the language in the late 20th Century , the Monotonic Orthography has been officially adopted, which uses only the acute accent (or sometimes a vertical bar intentionally distinct from any of the traditional accents) and omits the breathings. SAMPLE GREEK TEXT EXAMPLES OF POLYTONIC CHARACTERS The following tables list some of the characters required in polytonic Greek. Upper case Note that depending on the font used in your browser, the upper-case letters with iota subscript may display with a separate (adscript) iota. Lower case SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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