The hypodiastole (Greek: ὑποδιαστολή, hypodiastolḗ, lit. 'lower separation [mark]'), also known as a diastole,[1] was an interpunct developed in late Ancient and Byzantine Greek texts before the separation of words by spaces was common. In the scriptio continua then used, a group of letters might have separate meanings as a single word or as a pair of words. The papyrological hyphen (enotikon) showed a group of letters should be read together as a single word, and the hypodiastole showed that they should be taken separately. Compare "ὅ,τι" ("whatever") to "ὅτι" ("...that...").[2]
The hypodiastole was similar in appearance to the comma and was eventually entirely conflated with it. In Modern Greek, ypodiastolī́ (υποδιαστολή) refers to the comma in its role as a decimal point, and words such as ό,τι are written with standard commas. A separate Unicode point, ISO/IEC 10646 standard (U+2E12) (⸒), exists for the hypodiastole but is intended only to reproduce its historical occurrence in Greek texts.[2]
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary, 1st ed. "diastole, n." Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1895.
- ^ a b Nicolas, Nick. "Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation Archived November 20, 2014, at the Wayback Machine". 2005. Accessed 7 October 2014.