Smooth breathing

The origin of the sign is thought to be the right-hand half ( ┤ ) of the letter H, which was used in some archaic Greek alphabets as while in others it was used for the vowel eta. It was developed by Aristophanes of Byzantium to help readers discern between similar words. For example, ὅρος horos 'boundary' (rough breathing) and ὄρος oros 'mountain' (smooth breathing). In medieval and modern script, it takes the form of a closing half moon (reverse C) or a closing single quotation mark: • • Smooth breathings were also used in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets when writing the Old Church Slavonic language. Today it is used in Church Slavonic according to a simple rule: if a word starts with a vowel, the vowel has a psili over it. From the Russian writing system, it was eliminated by Peter the Great during his alphabet and font-style reform (1707). All other Cyrillic-based modern writing systems are based on the Petrine script, so they have never had the smooth breathing. ==Coronis==

The coronis (, korōnís, "crow's beak" or "bent mark"), the symbol written over a vowel contracted by crasis, was originally an apostrophe after the letter: . In present use, its appearances in Ancient Greek are written over the medial vowel with the smooth breathing mark——and appearances of crasis in modern Greek are not marked. == Letters with smooth breathing mark==

In Unicode, the code points assigned to the smooth breathing are for Greek and for Cyrillic. The pair of space + spiritus lenis is . The coronis is assigned two distinct code points, and . == See also ==