Quote:
Originally Posted by katerina
I hope it doesn;t look very ..Greek to you
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It looks quite Greek to me, except that I need a magnifying glass to read the breathing marks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by aleCcowaN
You talk of accents but I think I'm also seeing there "espíritus" (I found they say "breathings" in English). Is that correct? OMθ (Oh, my Theos!) I am only interested in a little bit of dimotiki.
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The marks accompanying the letters of the alphabet are known as
diacritics (from Greek
diakrinein to distiguish). Diacritics are either accents or breathing marks. Every word beginning with a vowel must have a breathing mark on the vowel to show whether it is rough,
spiritus asper, or smooth
spiritus lenis. Quite a few Greek words start with a breathed vowel because they originally started with a sigma or a diagamma which were lost, just keeping a breathing which is the English
h.
Thus English
sweet is the same root as Greek
¹dÚj from
s#-hdÚj (Latin
sua(d)vis) and we get
hedonistic from that transition.