was written with digamma and heta : Pamphylian , written as in Homer (the reflexive pronoun) Boeotian for Attic Akademos Evidence from the poetic meter of Homer suggests that also occurred in the Archaic Greek of the Iliad and Odyssey, although they would not have been pronounced by Attic speakers and are not written in the Attic-influenced form of the text. The presence of these consonants would explain some cases of absence of elision, some cases in which the meter demands a heavy syllable but the text has a light syllable (positional quantity), and some cases in which a long vowel before a short vowel is not shortened (absence of epic correption). In the table below the scansion of the examples is shown with the breve for light syllables, the macron for heavy ones, and the pipe for the divisions between metrical feet. The sound is written using digamma, and with digamma and rough breathing, although the letter never appears in the actual text. Doubled consonants Single and double (geminated) consonants were distinguished from each other in Ancient Greek: for instance, contrasted with (also written ). In Ancient Greek poetry, a vowel followed by a double consonant counts as a heavy syllable in meter. Doubled consonants usually only occur between vowels, not at the beginning or the end of a word, except in the case of , for which see above. Gemination was lost in Standard Modern Greek, so that all consonants that used to be geminated are pronounced as singletons. Cypriot Greek, the Modern Greek dialect of Cyprus, however, preserves geminate consonants. A doubled in Attic corresponds to a in Ionic and other dialects. This sound arose from historic palatalization (see below). Vowels Archaic and Classical Greek vowels and diphthongs varied by dialect. The tables below show the vowels of Classical Attic in the IPA, paired with the vowel letters that represent them in the standard Ionic alphabet. The earlier Old Attic alphabet had certain differences. Attic Greek of the 5th century BC likely had 5 short and 7 long vowels: and . Vowel length was phonemic: some words are distinguished from each other by vowel length. In addition, Classical Attic had many diphthongs, all ending in or ; these are discussed below. In standard Ancient Greek spelling, the long vowels (spelled ) are distinguished from the short vowels (spelled ), but the long–short pairs , , and are