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Lesson 2 - Breathing and Punctuation Marks

The document explains the use of breathing marks in Greek, which indicate pronunciation for words starting with vowels, distinguishing between smooth and rough breathing. It also covers punctuation marks, noting similarities and differences with English, including the Greek colon and question mark. Additionally, it introduces the concept of direct speech in Greek, which is indicated by a capital letter instead of quotation marks.

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Damjan Gligorovic
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19 views2 pages

Lesson 2 - Breathing and Punctuation Marks

The document explains the use of breathing marks in Greek, which indicate pronunciation for words starting with vowels, distinguishing between smooth and rough breathing. It also covers punctuation marks, noting similarities and differences with English, including the Greek colon and question mark. Additionally, it introduces the concept of direct speech in Greek, which is indicated by a capital letter instead of quotation marks.

Uploaded by

Damjan Gligorovic
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Breathing & Punctuation Marks

Breathing marks
Every word that begins with a vowel must have a breathing mark over the first sound. They look like
quotation marks and are of two kinds:
 Smooth breathing - e.g. ἀρχη
 Rough breathing - e.g. ἁπτομαι
The rough breathing means you pronounce the word with a slight "kh" sound beforehand,
represented by our letter "h". So in the example above you would say "haptomai" not "aptomai".
(Imagine people from a Mediterranean background putting a bit more "grunt" into their "h" sound.
For native English speakers, this isn't a familiar sound, so either just pronounce it like the letter "h",
or make sure you stock up on saliva first.)
The smooth breathing means you pronounce it normally, without the "h". In the example above, it's
just "arch-ay".
The way I remember which is which: the Rough breathing faces Right.
When a word begins with a diphthong (one of the seven vowel blends), the breathing mark goes
over the second vowel:
 αὐτος, οἰκος
When a word begins with two vowels that are NOT one of the seven diphthongs, the breathing mark
goes over the first vowel:
 ἱερον
When a word begins with a capital letter (e.g. a proper name), the breathing mark goes before the
first vowel:
 Ἱεροσολυμα
Some notes:
 Words tend to have EITHER a rough OR a smooth breathing, not both.
 How do you learn it which words are rough and which are smooth? Most are smooth, so just
learn the rough exceptions as part of your vocabulary list
 Sometimes a word can appear with either breathing: technically these are different words.
For example, ἡ (rough breathing) is the feminine form of "the", and ἠ (smooth breathing)
means "or". There aren't many of these, and they tend to be short, common words.
I've seen other markings on Greek words. What are they?
 You mean, like τί, εἶ, χαρὶν, etc? These are called accents. They were introduced to
manuscripts at some point in the first millennium as an aid to pronunciation. For now, you
can ignore them. We don't use them in this introductory course, except in a few rare cases
in which the accent changes the meaning of the word.
What about the leaking omegas? Are they different?

Self-paced NT Greek – Lesson 2 © Morling College


Lesson 2 – Breathing & Punctuation : Page |2

 The little leak marks are called iota subscripts - they look like this ῳ. They can also appear
under etas and alphas - ῃ ᾳ.
 They make no difference to pronunciation as far as we're concerned. At some point they
were probably pronounced differently from the regular vowels, but by NT times they were
a relic of a bygone Greek era.
 We use them because they become helpful in marking out what part of a sentence the word
belongs to. You'll see this in future weeks. For now, just ignore them.

Punctuation marks
Greeks use two of the same punctuation marks we use, and in the same way - the comma and the
full stop. The only difference is that Greek isn't written with a capital letter at the start of each
sentence.
ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

There are two punctuation marks that are different. First, the colon, which looks like this·
νυνὶ δὲ μένει πίστις, ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη, τὰ τρία ταῦτα· μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη.
But now remain faith, hope, love, these three: but the greatest of these is love.
The colon is used in Greek where we would use our own colon : or semicolon ; There is no historical
evidence to suggest that by this period they had invented the ἐμωτικον.

And the final mark is the question mark, which looks the same as our semicolon;
Τί οὖν ἐροῦμεν;
What, then, shall we say?
In English, we change the order of our words to turn something into a question (I am speaking. Am
I speaking?). In Greek, it's all down to the punctuation (in written communication) or tone of voice
(in spoken communication).

Summary:
 Full stops and commas look and work the same in Greek as in English.
 The Greek colon looks like this · and works like our colon/semicolon.
 The Greek question mark looks like this ;

Introducing direct speech


Greeks don’t have quotation marks. The start of direct speech is usually indicated by a capital letter:
ὁ ἀγγελος λεγει, Προσκυνειτε τῳ θεῳ.
The angel says, “Worship God.”

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