The
spiritus lenis (
Latin for "smooth breathing";
psilòn pneûma or ψιλή
psilī́) is a
diacritical mark used in the
polytonic orthography. In
ancient Greek, it indicates the lack of initial
aspiration, or the absence of the
voiceless glottal fricative () from the beginning of a word. Some authorities have interpreted it as representing a
glottal stop, but a final vowel at the end of a word is regularly elided (shortened) where the following word starts with a vowel. Spiritus lenis would not happen if the second word began with a glottal stop (or any form of stop consonant). In his
Vox Graeca, W. Sidney 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
rhos. It did not occur on an initial
upsilon.
The spiritus lenis was kept in the traditional polytonic orthography even after the /h/ sound had disappeared from the language in
Hellenistic times. It has been dropped in the modern
monotonic orthography.
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 [h] 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:
Psila pneumata were also used in the
early Cyrillic and
Glagolitic alphabets when writing the
Old Church Slavonic language. Today it is used in
Church Slavonic according to a simple rule: if a word starts with a vowel, the vowel has a psili over it. From the
Russian writing system, it was eliminated by
Peter the Great during his alphabet and font-style reform (1707). All other Cyrillic-based modern writing systems are based on the Petrine script, so they have never had the psili.
In
Unicode, the
code points assigned to the spiritus lenis are U+0313 ( ) named “COMBINING COMMA ABOVE” for Greek and U+0486 ( ) named “COMBINING CYRILLIC PSILI PNEUMATA” for Cyrillic. The pair of space + spiritus lenis is U+1FBF ( ), named “GREEK PSILI”.
See also
