|
Monotonic orthography is the simplified way for spelling modern Greek introduced in the 1980s. It replaces all the traditional Greek accents — grave accent ( ` ), acute accent ( ยด ), and circumflex ( ^ or ~ ) — by only one, the acute accent, and abandons the use of the rough breathing or spiritus asper) ( ̔ ) and smooth breathing or spiritus lenis ( ̓ ).
The simplification was justified by the fact that the polytonic orthography was complex and difficult to learn, and the diacritics had no significance in modern speech, merely giving some etymological information about the words and their ancient pronunciation. The simplification was frowned upon by many conservatives.
See also
Greek alphabet
|
