Accents and Breathing Marks
3.1 Ancient Greeks, of course, knew how to pronounce their own words. When large numbers of foreigners (ξένοι) started learning Greek in antiquity, Greek scholars developed additional symbols to help non-Greeks pronounce the language. These additional marks have since remained part of the spelling conventions, or orthography, of each word. As a result, ancient Greek is considered a POLYTONIC – “many accents” – writing system. There are three classes of additional marks:
- Breathing marks
- Accent marks
- Punctuation marks
Charts JPG
