polytonic

Polytonic refers to a diacritic system used in writing Greek texts, chiefly Ancient, Koine, and Byzantine, that supplements the alphabet with marks indicating pronunciation and syllable structure. It contrasts with the monotonic system used in modern Greek, which employs a single acute accent and no breathing marks or other diacritics.

The polytonic system includes several categories of marks. Breathing marks indicate initial aspiration: rough breathing and smooth breathing. Accent marks indicate pitch or stress: the acute (oxía), the grave (varia), and the circumflex (perispomení), with the circumflex marking a long vowel that historically combined a rising and falling pitch. The iota subscript is a small, vertical iota written under certain vowels to reflect historical vowel length and spelling. The dialytika, or diaeresis, is a two-dot mark over a vowel to indicate that two adjacent vowels are to be pronounced separately. In practice, polytonic orthography preserves distinctions that were once phonemic or morphophonemic, aiding linguistic analysis and the reading of ancient texts. Some editions also use iota adscript in certain contexts.

Usage and history: polytonic Greek was developed and standardized during the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods and remained the norm for scholarly editions of Classical and Koine Greek, as well as many ecclesiastical texts, into the 19th and early 20th centuries. In Greece, public education switched to monotonic orthography in 1982, though polytonic practice continues among scholars, theologians, and in critical editions of ancient Greek literature. Digital typography and scholarly publishing routinely support polytonic input to preserve these historical diacritics.