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The dagesh (דגש) or daghesh 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 (vowel points). 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, carrying a different phonetic function, may be applied to different consonants; the same mark is also employed in the vowel shuruq.
The two functions of dagesh are distinguished as either kal (light) or hazak (strong).
Dagesh Kal
Dagesh Kal (sometimes referred to as "dagesh lene") may be placed inside the letters bet ב, kaf כ & ך, pe פ gimel ג, dalet ד, tav ת. In Modern Israeli Hebrew, the effect of the dagesh on the above letters is to turn a fricative sound into its equivalent plosive:
- The letter bet sounds like v without and b with dagesh.
- The letter kaf sounds like kh (*) without and k with dagesh.
- The letter pe sounds like f without and p with dagesh.
Dagesh Hazak
Dagesh Hazak (sometimes referred to as "dagesh forte") may be placed in almost any letter to indicate a doubling of that letter in pronunciation. This phonological variation is not adhered to in Modern Hebrew and is only used by current speakers of Hebrew in situations for careful pronunciation, such as reading of scriptures in a synagogue service, 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. (A few instances of resh with dagesh are Masoretically recorded in the Hebrew Bible, as well as a few cases of aleph with a dagesh, such as in Leviticus 23:17.)
The presence of a dagesh hazak 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.
Unicode encodings
In computer typography there are two ways to use a dagesh with Hebrew text. Here are Unicode examples:
bet + dagesh: בּ בּ = U+05D1 U+05BC kaf + dagesh: כּ כּ = U+05DB U+05BC pe + dagesh: פּ פּ = U+05E4 U+05BC
bet with dagesh: בּ בּ = U+FB31 kaf with dagesh: כּ כּ = U+FB3B pe with dagesh: פּ פּ = U+FB44
Some fonts, character sets, encodings, and OSes may support neither, one, or both methods.
Sources
"Dagesh"