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In the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing (Ancient Greek: δασὺ πνεῦμα dasỳ pneûma or δασεῖα daseîa: modern Greek δασεία dasía; Latin spīritus asper), is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an /h/ sound before a vowel, diphthong, or rho. It remained in the polytonic orthography even after the Hellenistic period, when the sound disappeared from the Greek language. In modern monotonic orthography, that is after 1980, it has been dropped.
The absence of an /h/ sound is marked by the smooth breathing.
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The rough breathing comes from the left-hand half of the letter H.[1] In some Greek dialects, 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, where the vowel has shifted to [i].
The rough breathing ( ῾ ) is placed over an initial vowel, or over the second vowel of a initial diphthong.
An upsilon[2] or rho[3] at the beginning of a word always takes a rough breathing.
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.
In crasis (contraction of two words), when the second word has a rough breathing, the contracted vowel does not take a rough breathing. Instead, the consonant before the contracted vowel changes to the aspirated equivalent (i.e., π → φ, τ → θ, κ → χ),[4] if possible, and the contracted vowel takes the apostrophe or coronis (identical to the smooth breathing).
In Unicode, the code point assigned to the rough breathing is U+0314 ̔ combining reversed comma above. The pair of space + rough breathing is U+1FFE ῾ greek dasia.
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, a symbol similar to the rough breathing U+02BF ʿ modifier letter left half ring, is used to represent the letter ayin.