Dagesh

The dagesh (Hebrew: דָּגֵשׁ, romanized: dagésh) is a diacritic that is used in the Hebrew alphabet. It takes the form of a dot placed inside a consonant. A dagesh can either indicate a "hard" plosive version of the consonant (known as dagesh qal, literally 'light dot') or that the consonant is geminated (known as dagesh ḥazaq, literally 'hard dot'), although the latter is rarely used in Modern Hebrew.

The dagesh was added to Hebrew orthography at the same time as the Masoretic system of niqqud (vowel points).

Two other diacritics with different functions, the mappiq and the shuruq dot, are visually identical to the dagesh but are only used with vowel letters.

The dagesh and mappiq symbols are often omitted when writing niqqud (e.g. בּ‎ is written as ב‎). In these cases, dagesh may be added to help readers resolve the ambiguity. The use or omission of such marks is usually consistent throughout any given context.

A dagesh kal or dagesh qal (דגש קל, or דגש קשיין, also dagesh lene, weak/light dagesh) may be placed inside the consonants ב‎ bet, ג‎ gimel, ד‎ dalet, כ‎ kaf, פ‎ pe and ת‎ tav. They each have two sounds, the original hard plosive sound (which originally contained no dagesh as it was the only pronunciation), and a soft fricative version produced as such for speech efficiency because of the position in which the mouth is left immediately after a vowel has been produced.

Prior to the Babylonian captivity, the soft sounds of these letters did not exist in Hebrew, but they were later differentiated in Hebrew writing as a result of the Aramaic-influenced pronunciation of Hebrew.^{[citation needed]} The Aramaic languages, including Jewish versions of Aramaic, have these same allophonic pronunciations of the letters.

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. In Biblical Hebrew this was the case within a word and also across word boundaries, though in Modern Hebrew there are no longer across word boundaries, since the soft and hard sounds are no longer allophones of each other, but regarded as distinct phonemes.

When vowel diacritics are used, the hard sounds are indicated by a central dot called dagesh, while the soft sounds lack the mark. In Modern Hebrew, however, the dagesh only changes the pronunciation of ב‎ bet, כ‎ kaf, and פ‎ pe. Traditional Ashkenazic pronunciation also varies the pronunciation of ת‎ tav, as does Yemenite pronunciation. Some traditional Middle Eastern pronunciations^[which?] carry alternate forms for ד‎ dalet.