Hypodiastole

Hypodiastole (left). Note the difference from a comma (right).

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 separator, 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]

• Interpunct
• Obelos
• Coronis
• Paragraphos

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