Rough breathing

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In the

The absence of an /h/ sound is marked by the smooth breathing.

The character, or those with similar shape such as U+02BB ʻ MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA, have also been used for a similar sound by Thomas Wade (and others) in the Wade–Giles system of romanization for Mandarin Chinese. Herbert Giles and others have used a left (opening) curved single quotation mark for the same purpose; the apostrophe, backtick, and visually similar characters are often seen as well.

The rough breathing comes from the left-hand half of the letter H.

In some writing conventions, the rough breathing is written on the second of two rhos in the middle of a word.[3] This is transliterated as rrh in Latin.

• διάῤῥοια diárrhoia 'diarrhoea'

In

Under the archaizing influence of Katharevousa, this change has been preserved in modern Greek neologisms coined on the basis of ancient words, e.g. πρωθυπουργός ('prime minister'), from πρῶτος ('first') and ὑπουργός ('minister'), where the latter was originally aspirated.

In the ancient Laconian dialect, medial intervocalic σ would become a rough breathing: ἐνῑ́κᾱἑ for Attic ἐνῑ́κησε.^[5]

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).

There is a polytonic Greek code range in Unicode, covering precomposite versions (i.e. breathing mark + vowel or rho, or vowel with pitch accent and/or iota subscript): 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

• Greek diacritics
  • Smooth breathing
• Ayin ( ʿ )
• ʻOkina ( ʻ )