Psilosis () is the sound change in which the Ancient Greek language lost its consonant sound during antiquity. The term comes from the Greek ψίλωσις psílōsis ("smoothing, thinning out")[.] and is related to the Greek term for smooth breathing (ψιλή psilḗ), the sign for the absence of initial in a word. Dialects that have lost are called psilotic.
The linguistic phenomenon is comparable to that of h-dropping in dialects of Modern English and to the development by which was lost in late Latin.
History
The loss of happened at different times for various dialects of Greek. The eastern
Ionic Greek dialects, the
Aeolic Greek dialect of
Lesbos, as well as the
Doric Greek dialects of
Crete and
Ancient Elis, were already psilotic at the beginning of their written record.
In
Attic Greek, there was widespread variation in popular speech during the classical period,
[ Also: ] but the formal standard language retained . This variation continued into the Hellenistic
Koine Greek.
Rough and smooth breathing signs
Alexandrine grammarians codified Greek orthography during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC and introduced the signs for the rough ( ῾ ) and smooth ( ᾿ ) breathings to make the distinction between words with and without initial . However, the grammarians were writing at a time when this distinction was no longer natively mastered by many speakers. By the late Roman and early
Byzantine Greek, had been lost in all forms of the language.
Orthography
Eta and heta
The loss of the is reflected in the development of the
Greek alphabet by the change in the function of the letter
eta (Η), which first served as the sign of ("
heta") but then, in the psilotic dialects, was reused as the sign of the long vowel .
Rough and smooth breathing
In the
Greek diacritics that started in the Hellenistic period of
Ancient Greek, the original sound, where it used to occur, is represented by a
diacritic ( ῾ ), called the
rough breathing or
spiritus asper. This sign is also conventionally used in analogy to the Attic usage when rendering texts from the Ionic dialect, which was already psilotic by the time at which the texts were written. However, for Aeolic texts, the convention is to mark all words as nonaspirated.
See also
