letters , and continued to be ambiguous between long and short phonemes. Spelling of /h/ In the Old Attic alphabet, was written with the letterform of eta . In the Ionic dialect of Asia Minor, was lost early on, and the letter in the Ionic alphabet represented . In 403 BC, when the Ionic alphabet was adopted in Athens, the sound ceased to be represented in writing. In some inscriptions was represented by a symbol formed from the left-hand half of the original letter: (). Later grammarians, during the time of the Hellenistic Koine, developed that symbol further into a diacritic, the rough breathing (; ; for short), which was written on the top of the initial vowel. Correspondingly, they introduced the mirror image diacritic called smooth breathing (; ; for short), which indicated the absence of . These marks were not used consistently until the time of the Byzantine Empire. Phonotactics Ancient Greek words were divided into syllables. A word has one syllable for every short vowel, long vowel, or diphthong. In addition, syllables began with a consonant if possible, and sometimes ended with a consonant. Consonants at the beginning of the syllable are the syllable onset, the vowel in the middle is a nucleus, and the consonant at the end is a coda. In dividing words into syllables, each vowel or diphthong belongs to one syllable. A consonant between vowels goes with the following vowel. In the following transcriptions, a period separates syllables. ('I say'): (two syllables) ('this kind') (): (three syllables) ('if only he would want'): (four syllables) ('sun's') (Homeric Greek): (five syllables) Any remaining consonants are added at the end of a syllable. And when a double consonant occurs between vowels, it is divided between syllables. One half of the double consonant goes to the previous syllable, forming a coda, and one goes to the next, forming an onset. Clusters of two or three consonants are also usually divided between syllables, with at least one consonant joining the previous vowel and forming the syllable coda of its syllable, but see below. ('another'): ('there is'): ('opinion'): ('enemy'): Syllable weight Syllables in Ancient Greek were either light or heavy. This distinction is important in Ancient Greek poetry, which was made up of patterns of heavy and light syllables. Syllable weight is based on both consonants and vowels. Ancient Greek accent, by contrast, is only based on vowels. A