Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Two punctuation marks are used in Greek texts which are not found in English: the colon, which consists of a dot raised above the line ( · ) and the Greek question mark, which looks like the English semicolon ( ; ).
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period.The more complex polytonic orthography (Greek: πολυτονικό σύστημα γραφής, romanized: polytonikó sýstīma grafī́s), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology.
In addition to no punctuation, many original source texts in ancient Greek were written as an unbroken stream of letters, with no separation between words. The hypodiastole , a curved, comma-like mark ⸒ , was used to disambiguate certain homonyms and marked the word-break in a sequence of letters that should be understood as two separate words.
The orthography of the Greek language ultimately has its roots in the adoption of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, Mycenaean, was written in Linear B, although there was a lapse of several centuries (the Greek Dark Ages) between the time Mycenaean stopped being written and the time when the Greek alphabet came into use.
Ancient Greek text did not mark word division with spaces or interpuncts, instead running the words together (scripta continua). In the Hellenistic period, a variety of symbols arose for punctuation or editorial marking; such punctuation (or the lack thereof) are variously romanized, inserted, or ignored in different modern editions.
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. [1] The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections.
Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us; Pages for logged out editors learn more
The smooth breathing (Ancient Greek: ψιλὸν πνεῦμα, romanized: psilòn pneûma; Greek: ψιλή psilí; Latin: spiritus lenis) is a diacritical mark used in polytonic orthography. In Ancient Greek, it marks the absence of the voiceless glottal fricative /h/ from the beginning of a word.