Remove smooth breathing
There is no purpose for the smooth breathing mark in modern orthography of Ancient Greek text. It is extremely similar to the rough breathing mark and both display poorly at small resolutions. There would be much greater contrast between smooth and rough breathing if only one of these diacritics was used. The obvious choice is to keep the rough breathing mark and ditch the smooth breathing. Open your eyes (if they haven’t already been strained to the point of vision loss by looking at so many smooth breathing marks) and face the facts: Ancient Greek is objectively more readable without the smooth breathing mark.
The removal of the smooth breathing mark can be done completely without loss of information, and is fully reversible. I have made a Google Sheet which can automatically remove or put back smooth breathing marks. Try it yourself by pressing the button below and making a copy of the spreadsheet:
Think of all the scenarios in which the presence of a smooth breathing mark is a detriment to the world:
- A visually impaired learner is struggling to internalise which Greek words start with a rough breathing.
- A learner with dyslexia struggles to differentiate the symbols enough already, and now has a particularly hard time with breathing marks.
- You’re reading at night from a printed text (because you’re trying to cut your screen use before bed) and the tiny breathing marks in the printed text are nigh indecipherable in low-light conditions.
- You’re getting old and your vision is starting to fade. Too bad if you want to distinguish breathing marks.
- You’re reading Greek text from a smartphone screen and at that tiny resolution it’s difficult to tell apart the breathing marks from an acute accent let alone from each other. Why should the presence or absence of an ‘h’ sound depend on literally one pixel – or less?!
Now think of all the scenarios in which the presence of a smooth breathing mark is of any benefit at all:
- You are a medieval monk who is annotating a hand-written manuscript with breathing marks. You need to mark every initial vowel with something so that you know which pages you’ve already marked.
Given that the use-case for the smooth breathing mark is extremely limited, and the process of removing smooth breathing marks is 100% reversible, dropping the smooth breathing mark is a minimal risk proposition. There is basically no downside to doing this in the modern age, and the upside is that its removal will increase readability of Ancient Greek for all humans, especially those with visual impairments.
Remember when The Simpsons had a sketch where the loveable fool Homer invented an ‘Everything’s OK alarm’ that would sound every three minutes unless something’s not OK? And it could not be turned off? The smooth breathing mark is Ancient Greek’s ‘Everything’s OK’ diacritic. It would be a complete joke if anyone were to invent a diacritic to indicate the lack of an accent or the lack of anything else and to mandate its use. The smooth breathing mark is a joke too but no one is laughing. We’re too darn busy squinting to laugh at it.
There are two types of readers of Ancient Greek. Those whose vision is currently too poor to distinguish smooth and rough breathing marks, and those whose vision will become too poor to distinguish them if they live long enough. Around 25% of the elderly are classified as visually impaired. Breathing marks are so difficult to distinguish that they become unreadable under anything less than ideal viewing conditions; that is, long before one hits the threshold of qualifying as visually impaired. If you hope to live to an advanced age and continue to read Ancient Greek in your autumn years, please consider that one day you too will be unable to distinguish smooth and rough breathing marks in normal sized printed text even if today you find them readable.
/J/
…Now with that said, I’m off to propose we use J’s in Latin especially in place of capital I at the start of proper names, to eliminate the ‘Juno-Luno’ problem where learners unfamiliar with Latin proper names mistake an uppercase I with a lowercase L, and read the name of the goddess of marriage (Iuno in the most textbooks) as ‘LUNO’. Yes, Latin teachers do specifically choose a serif font to help distinguish uppercase I from lowercase L, but for many students those serifs are simply too tiny to noticeably distinguish I from l. We can prevent this unnecessary incomprehension by simply using a capital J. Now who is with me…
Pictured: a bronze medallion produced by the Vatican with the error ‘Lesus’ in place of ‘Jesus’. The ‘Juno-Luno’ problem causes costly errors! Maybe I should have called it the ‘Jesus-Lesus’ problem? Or maybe ‘Juno-Luno’ is the classical Latin version and ‘Jesus-Lesus’ is its ecclesiastical equivalent…
Found in Antiquity 