This sign is also conventionally used in analogy to the Attic usage when rendering texts from the Ionic dialect, which was already psilotic by the time the texts were written.

Hamaxitus was located in an Aeolic-speaking area: Aeolic, like other so-called East Greek dialects, was psilotic and so, unlike Attic Greek, had lost the phoneme /h/.

The eastern Ionic dialects, the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos, as well as the Doric dialects of Crete and Elis, were already psilotic at the beginning of their written record.