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In the Greek diacritics of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing ( or δασεῖα ; ) character is a diacritic used to indicate the presence of an sound before a vowel, diphthong, or after rho. It remained in the polytonic orthography even after the Hellenistic period, when the sound disappeared from the Greek language. In the monotonic orthography of Modern Greek phonology, in use since 1982, it is not used at all.
The absence of an sound is marked by the smooth breathing.
The character, or those with similar shape such as , 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.
An upsilonSmyth, par. 10. or rhoSmyth, par. 13. at the beginning of a word always takes a rough breathing.
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),Smyth, par. 64. if possible, and the contracted vowel takes the apostrophe or coronis (identical to the smooth breathing).
Under the archaism influence of Katharevousa, this change has been preserved in modern Greek 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.Smyth, not. 9D.
It was also used in the original Latin transcription of Armenian for example with in t̔.
The pair of space + combining rough breathing is . It may bind typographically with the letter encoded before it to its left, to create ligatures for example with 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 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 , 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
In Latin transcription of Semitic languages, especially Arabic language and Hebrew language, either or a symbol similar to it, , 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).
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