Monotonic orthography is the simplified way for spelling modern Greek introduced in 1982. It replaces all the traditional Greek accents—acute accent (  ), grave accent (  ), and circumflex (  or  )—with only one, the acute accent, and abandons the use of the rough breathing or spiritus asper (  ) and smooth breathing or spiritus lenis (  ).

The simplification was justified by the fact that the polytonic orthography was complex and difficult to learn, and the diacritics had no significance in modern speech, merely giving some etymological information about the words and their ancient pronunciation. The simplification is frowned upon by some people who believe that the polytonic orthography provides a cultural link to the past. The Greek Orthodox church, for example, continues to use polytonic orthography, and some books are still published in polytonic. However, the fact that classical Greeks did not, in fact, use polytonic diacritics, as they were a posterior addition to the written language, makes the defense of such arguments dubious.

See also

• Greek alphabet
• Diacritic
• Greek orthography
• Diacritics (Greek alphabet)

Hellenic scripts | Greek language | Orthography

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