Editing Circumflex (section)

====Pitch====
{{See also|Ancient Greek accent}}
The circumflex has its origins in the [[Greek diacritics|polytonic orthography]] of [[Ancient Greek]], where it marked [[vowel length|long vowels]] that were pronounced with high and then falling [[Pitch accent|pitch]]. In a similar vein, the circumflex is today used to mark [[tone contour]] in the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]]. This is also how it is used in [[Bamanankan language|Bamanankan]] (as opposed to a [[háček]], which signifies a rising tone on a syllable).

The shape of the circumflex was originally a combination of the [[acute accent|acute]] and [[grave accent]]s (^), as it marked a [[syllable]] contracted from two vowels: an acute-accented vowel and a non-accented vowel (all non-accented syllables in Ancient Greek were once marked with a grave accent).<ref>{{Cite book |last=Smyth |first=Herbert Weir |url=http://www.ccel.org/s/smyth/grammar/html/toc_uni.htm |title=A Greek Grammar for Colleges |date=1920 |publisher=American Book Company |location=New York |author-link=Herbert Weir Smyth |via=ccel.org |access-date=2017-10-15 |archive-date=2018-01-26 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180126022458/http://www.ccel.org/s/smyth/grammar/html/toc_uni.htm |url-status=live }}: "155. The ancients regarded the grave originally as belonging to every syllable not accented with the acute or circumflex; and some Mss. show this in practice, e.g. πὰγκρὰτής. [...]"</ref>{{clarify|date=April 2014|reason=A. Was it universal up to a period? Or did it happen only in some cases, by some, but not all, "groups" of scribes/"writers"? B. A citation is in any case needed.}} Later a variant similar to the [[tilde]] (~) was also used.

{|align="center" style="font-size: large"
|-
| νόος 
|rowspan=2 style="padding: 1em; text-align: center"| <em style="font-size: small">contraction </em><br/>→<br/><em style="font-size: small">([[synaeresis]])</em>
| ν-'''´ō`'''-ς = νō͂ς = νοῦς
|- 
| nóos 
| n-'''´ō`'''-s = nō̂s = noûs
|}

The term "circumflex" is also used to describe similar tonal accents that result from combining two vowels in related languages such  as Sanskrit and Latin.

Since [[Modern Greek]] has a [[stress (linguistics)|stress accent]] instead of a pitch accent, the circumflex has been replaced with an [[acute accent]] in the modern monotonic orthography.