Rough breathing

Tack-shaped archaic consonantal Heta, together with a lowercase variant designed for modern typography.

The rough breathing comes from the left-hand half of the letter H.[1] 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[2] or rho[3] at the beginning of a word always takes a rough breathing.

• ὕμνος hýmnos 'hymn'
• ῥυθμός rhythmós 'rhythm'

In Unicode, the code point assigned to the rough breathing is U+0314  ̔  COMBINING REVERSED COMMA ABOVE. It is intended to be used in all alphabetic scripts (including Greek and Latin).

It was also used in the original Latin transcription of Armenian for example with U+0074 t LATIN SMALL LETTER T in t̔.

The pair of space + combining rough breathing is U+02BD  ʽ  MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA. It may bind typographically with the letter encoded before it to its left, to create ligatures for example with U+0074 t LATIN SMALL LETTER T in tʽ, and it is used for the modern Latin transcription of Armenian (which no longer uses the combining version).

It is also encoded for compatibility as U+1FFE  ῾  GREEK DASIA mostly for usage in the Greek script, where it may be used before Greek capital letters to its right and aligned differently, e.g. with U+0391 ῾Α GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA, where the generic space+combining dasia should be used after the letter it modifies to its left (the space is inserted so that the dasia will be to the left instead of above that letter). Basically, U+1FFE was encoded for full roundtrip compatibility with legacy 8-bit encodings of the Greek script in documents where dasia was encoded before the Greek capital letter it modifies (it is then not appropriate for transliterating Armenian and Semitic scripts to the Latin script).

When U+1FFE ῾ GREEK DASIA is used incorrectly after a Latin letter it is supposed to modify, for example with U+0074 t LATIN SMALL LETTER T in t῾d, a visible small gap will occur between the leading Latin letter t and the Greek dasia, and the Greek dasia may interact typographically with the Latin letter d following it to suppress this gap, like in Greek.

There is a polytonic Greek code range in Unicode, covering precomposite versions (breathing mark + vowel etc.): Ἁ ἁ, Ἇ ἇ, ᾏ ᾇ, ᾉ ᾁ, Ἑ ἑ, Ἡ ἡ, Ἧ ἧ, ᾟ ᾗ, ᾙ ᾑ, Ἱ ἱ, Ἷ ἷ, Ὁ ὁ, Ῥ ῥ, Ὑ ὑ, Ὗ ὗ, Ὡ ὡ, Ὧ ὧ, ᾯ ᾧ, and ᾩ ᾡ.

The rough breathing was also used in the early Cyrillic alphabet when writing the Old Church Slavonic language. In this context it is encoded as Unicode U+0485  ҅  COMBINING CYRILLIC DASIA PNEUMATA

In Latin transcription of Semitic languages, especially Arabic and Hebrew, either U+02BD ʽ MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA or a symbol similar to it, U+02BF  ʿ  MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING, is used to represent the letter ayin. This left half ring may also be used for the Latin transcription of Armenian (though the Armenian aspiration is phonetically nearer to the Greek dasia than the Semitic ayin).

• Greek diacritics
  • Smooth breathing
• Ayin ( ʿ )