The hypodiastole (

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

: , , ), also known as a diastole,''Oxford English Dictionary'', "diastole, ''n.''" Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1895. was an

interpunct An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot and centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script. (Word-separating spaces did no ...

developed in late

Ancient Ancient history is a time period from the History of writing, beginning of writing and recorded human history to as far as late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian language, Sumerian c ...

and

Byzantine Greek Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek, Byzantine Greek, or Romaic) is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the Ottoman co ...

texts before the separation of words by

spaces Spaces may refer to: * Google Spaces (app), a cross-platform application for group messaging and sharing * Windows Live Spaces, the next generation of MSN Spaces * Spaces (software), a virtual desktop manager implemented in Mac OS X Leopard * Spac ...

was common. In the then used, a group of letters might have separate meanings as a single word or as a pair of words. The

papyrological hyphen The tie is a symbol in the shape of an arc (geometry), arc similar to a large breve, used in Greek language, Greek, phonetic alphabets, and Z notation. It can be used between two characters with spacing as punctuation, non-spacing as a diacritic, ...

() showed a group of letters should be read together as a single word, and the hypodiastole showed that they should be taken separately. Compare "" ("whatever") to "" ("...that..."). The hypodiastole was similar in appearance to the

comma The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline ...

and was eventually entirely conflated with it. In

Modern Greek Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...

, () refers to the comma in its role as a

decimal point A decimal separator is a symbol used to separate the integer part from the fractional part of a number written in decimal form (e.g., "." in 12.45). Different countries officially designate different symbols for use as the separator. The choi ...

, and words such as are written with standard commas. A separate

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

point,

ISO/IEC 10646 ISO/IEC JTC 1, entitled "Information technology", is a joint technical committee (JTC) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Its purpose is to develop, maintain and pr ...

standard (U+2E12) (⸒), exists for the hypodiastole but is intended only to reproduce its historical occurrence in Greek texts.Nicolas, Nick.
Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation
". 2005. Accessed 7 October 2014.

References

See also