Dagesh


The dagesh is a diacritic used in the Hebrew alphabet. It was added to the Hebrew orthography at the same time as the Masoretic system of niqqud. It takes the form of a dot placed inside a Hebrew letter and has the effect of modifying the sound in one of two ways.
An identical mark, called mappiq, has a different phonetic function, and can be applied to different consonants; the same mark is also employed in the vowel shuruk.
Dagesh and mappiq symbols are often omitted in writing. For instance, is often written as. The use or omission of such marks is usually consistent throughout any given context. The two functions of dagesh are distinguished as either kal or ḥazak.

Dagesh kal

A dagesh kal or dagesh qal may be placed inside the consonants bet, gimel, dalet, kaf, pe and tav. They each had two sounds: the original "hard" sound, and a "soft" sound. Before the Babylonian captivity, the soft sounds did not exist in Hebrew, but were added as a result of Aramaic-influenced pronunciation of Hebrew after this point in history. The letters take on their hard sounds when they have no vowel sound before them, and take their soft sounds when a vowel immediately precedes them, across word boundaries in Biblical Hebrew, but not in Modern Hebrew. When vowel diacritics are used, the hard sounds are indicated by a central dot called dagesh, while the soft sounds lack a dagesh. In Modern Hebrew, however, the dagesh only changes the pronunciation of bet, kaf, and pe.
* Only in Ashkenazi pronunciation Tav without a dagesh is pronounced, while in another traditions it is assumed to have been pronounced at the time niqqud was introduced. In Modern Hebrew, it is always pronounced.
** The letters gimmel and dalet may also contain a dagesh kal. This indicates an allophonic variation of the phonemes and, a variation which no longer exists in modern Hebrew pronunciation. The variations are believed to have been: =, =, =, =. The Hebrew spoken by the Jews of Yemen still preserves unique phonemes for these letters with and without a dagesh.
*** The letter hey when word final is usually silent in order to indicate the presence of a word-final vowel. But when it receives a dagesh kal, the hey is pronounced instead of being silent. This is the rule in historic pronunciation, but in Modern Hebrew, this rule is generally ignored. However, when a non-silent word-final hey occurs, it can take a furtive patach.

Pronunciation

In Israel's general population, the pronunciation of some of the above letters has become pronounced the same as others:

Dagesh hazak

Dagesh ḥazak or dagesh ḥazaq may be placed in almost any letter, this indicated a gemination of that consonant in the pronunciation of pre-modern Hebrew. This gemination is not adhered to in modern Hebrew and is only used in careful pronunciation, such as reading of scriptures in a synagogue service, recitations of biblical or traditional texts or on ceremonious occasions, and then only by very precise readers.
The following letters, the gutturals, almost never have a dagesh: aleph א, he ה, chet ח, ayin ע, resh ר.
The presence of a dagesh ḥazak or consonant-doubling in a word may be entirely morphological, or, as is often the case, is a lengthening to compensate for a deleted consonant.
A dagesh ḥazak may be placed in letters for one of the following reasons:
In Masoretic manuscripts the opposite of a dagesh would be indicated by a rafe, a small line on top of the letter. This is no longer found in Hebrew, but may still sometimes be seen in Yiddish and Ladino.

Unicode encodings

In computer typography there are two ways to use a dagesh with Hebrew text. Here are Unicode examples:
Some fonts, character sets, encodings, and operating systems may support neither, one, or both methods.