Spiritus asper
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| Diacritical marks |
|---|
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accent
breve ( ˘ )
hook / dấu hỏi ( ̉ ) |
| Marks sometimes used as diacritics |
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apostrophe ( ’ ) |
The spiritus asper ("rough breathing"), dasy pneuma (Greek: dasu, δασύ) or dasia (Greek: δασεῖα), is a diacritical mark used in Greek. It indicates 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:
- ἁ- ἑ- ἡ- ἱ- ὁ- ὑ- ὡ- ῥ-;
- Ἁ- Ἑ- Ἡ- Ἱ- Ὁ- Ὑ- Ὡ- Ῥ-.
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 ὕμνος stands for humnos, "hymn", and ῥήτωρ for hrētōr (or rhētōr), "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.
The spiritus asper or dasia is part of the traditional polytonic orthography for Greek, and in this context is encoded as Unicode U+1FFE.
It 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 ҅ ( ◌҅ ).
In Latin transcription of Semitic languages, especially Arabic and Hebrew, a symbol similar to the spiritus asper, ʿ, U+02BF, is used to represent the letter ayin.
