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The spiritus lenis ("smooth breathing" or "soft breathing"), in Greek psilon pneuma or psilí, (ψιλή), is a diacritical mark used in the polytonic orthography. In Ancient Greek, it indicates the absence of initial aspiration: in other words, that the word does not begin with an [h] sound. Some authorities have interpreted it as representing a glottal stop, but a final vowel at the end of a word is regularly elided where the following word starts with a vowel, which would not happen if the second word began with a glottal stop (or any form of stop consonant). Allen accordingly regards the glottal stop interpretation as "highly improbable".^[1]

The spiritus lenis was kept in the traditional polytonic orthography even after the /h/ sound had disappeared from the language in Hellenistic times. It has been dropped in the modern monotonic orthography.

The spiritus lenis is written as on top of, or to the left of, an initial vowel (the second vowel of a pair comprising a diphthong), and also in certain editions on the first of a pair of rhos. It did not occur on an initial upsilon.

The origin of the sign is thought to be the right-hand half–  ┤  –of the letter H, which was used in some Greek dialects as an [h] while in others it was used for the vowel eta. In medieval and modern script, it takes the form of a closing half moon (reverse C) or a closing single quotation mark:

• ἀ- ἐ- ἠ- ἰ- ὀ- ὐ- ὠ;

• Ἀ- Ἐ- Ἠ- Ἰ- Ὀ- Ύ Ὠ.

Psila pneumata were also used in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets when writing the Old Church Slavonic language. Today it is used in Church Slavonic language under the simple rule: if a word starts with a vowel, the vowel has psili over it. From the Russian writing system, it was eliminated by Peter the Great during his alphabet and font style reform (1707). All other Cyrillic-based modern writing systems are actually based on the Petrine script, i.e. they have no psili from the very beginning.

In Unicode, spiritus lenis is encoded at U+1FBF (᾿) for Greek writing system and U+0486 or HTML entity ҆ ( ◌҆ ) in Cyrillic.

• Spiritus asper
• Polytonic orthography

1. ^ W. Sidney Allen (1968-74). Vox Graeca - a guide to the pronunciation of classical Greek. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-20626-X.