Polytonic is a writing system for the Greek language that includes diacritical marks indicating its prosody (intonation or melodicity). Its use for writing Modern Greek in official documents of the Greek state was abolished in 1982.
In fact, however, the elements that have been abolished are two out of the three accents. The breathing marks, the iota subscript, and of course, the rules governing their usage. The polytonic system could thus be referred to as complete, while the current system, known as the monotonic system, as simple. Let’s briefly examine the role of the abolished elements.
The accents describe the alternation of pitch (treble and bass) in the pronunciation of syllables. They are:
a) The acute accent, (´) which (as its name suggests in Greek), raises the pitch of the syllable it is placed on. Typically, this increase corresponds to a perfect fifth (a musical interval). It is the easiest and most natural interval for the human voice.
b) The grave accent (`), which is the opposite of the acute accent, lowers the pitch of the syllable by a perfect fifth.
c) The circumflex accent (῀) indicates that the pitch of the syllable it is placed on is circumflexed, meaning it rises and then falls within the same syllable. Therefore, it is only used in longer syllables where the voice has enough time to perform this rise and fall.
The only tonal mark that remains in use in the writing of Modern Greek, unlike the other two accents, is the acute accent.
The breathing marks (dasia – rough and psilí – smooth) began to be used as indicators of the presence or absence of the rough breathing sound [/h/] in the Attic dialect, at the beginning of a word. The rough breathing mark (῾) indicates the presence of the rough breathing sound [/h/] before the letter it is placed on, while the smooth breathing mark (᾿) indicates its absence. They were only written above vowels or the letter rho (ρ), which was always rough at the beginning of a word.
The musical pitch of Ancient Greek has been replaced in Modern Greek by dynamic intonation, and the rough breathing sound [/h/] has disappeared. However, it has remained in Latin and other languages that adopted elements from Greek.
The iota subscript is marked with a small iota (ι) placed beneath eta (η), oméga (ω), and alpha (α), meaning it is used only with long vowels (η, ω) and with the breve alpha (α). It represents the previous presence of an iota (ι) after the vowel, forming a so-called long diphthong. Such diphthongs (e.g., ηι, ωι, αι) – phonologically distinct from their corresponding short diphthongs (e.g., ει, οι, ᾰι) – were characteristic of Ancient Greek in the preclassical and classical periods.
An example is the word «ωδή» [odé] (song, hymn) written in the dative case in the polytonic system with iota subscript and without it:
