Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

the rafe or raphe (, , meaning "weak, limp") is a

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

(), a subtle horizontal overbar placed above certain letters to indicate that they are to be pronounced as

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

s. It originated with the Tiberian

Masoretes The Masoretes (, lit. 'Masters of the Tradition') were groups of Jewish scribe- scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries CE, based primarily in the Jewish centers of the Levant (e.g., Tiberias and Jerusalem) an ...

as part of the extended system of ''

niqqud In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud ( or ) is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the Ea ...

'' (vowel points), and has the opposite meaning of '' dagesh qal'', showing that one of the letters is to be pronounced as a

and not as a

plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

, or (sometimes) that a consonant is single and not double; or, as the opposite to a ''

mappiq The mappiq ( ''mapík''; also ''mapiq'', ''mapik'', ''mappik'', lit. "causing to go out") is a diacritic used in the Hebrew alphabet. It is part of the Masoretes' system of niqqud (vowel points), and was added to Hebrew orthography at the same t ...

'', to show that the letters or are silent (''

mater lectionis A ''mater lectionis'' ( , ; , ''matres lectionis'' ; original ) is any consonant letter that is used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. The letters that do this in Hebrew are ...

''). The rafe generally fell out of use for Hebrew with the coming of printing, although according to Gesenius (1813) at that time it could still be found in a few places in printed

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' siddur A siddur ( ''sīddūr'', ; plural siddurim ) is a Jewish prayer book containing a set order of daily prayers. The word comes from the Hebrew root , meaning 'order.' Other terms for prayer books are ''tefillot'' () among Sephardi Jews, ''tef ...

s (e.g. those printed by ArtScroll) a diacritical symbol, typographically the same as the rafe, but utterly unrelated, is used to mark instances of "moving sheva" (''Shva Na'').Rabbi Nosson Scherman, Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, ''Siddur Kol Yaakov/The Complete ArtScroll Siddur—Nusach Ashkenaz'', 3rd Edition, Eighteenth Impression, Mesorah Publications Ltd., July 2003. . Preface, p. IX. The rafe is similar in function to the ''buailte'' (dot above, denoting

lenition In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language ...

) in the old-style

Irish alphabet Irish orthography is the set of conventions used to write Irish. A spelling reform in the mid-20th century led to , the modern standard written form used by the Government of Ireland, which regulates both spelling and grammar. The reform re ...

Yiddish

Yiddish orthography Yiddish orthography is the writing system used for the Yiddish language. It includes Yiddish spelling rules and the Hebrew script, which is used as the basis of a full vocalic alphabet. Letters that are silent or represent glottal stops in the H ...

, the rafe distinguishes from and in words of Semitic origin also from (.

Ladino

In Ladino the rafe, called a ''varrica'' (“little crossbar”), looks more like a breve-shaped diacritic (ﬞ ) on top of the letter (◌ﬞ). When written in the square form, or when unable to apply the varrica rafe diacritic to a letter, it is replaced by a

geresh Geresh ( in Hebrew: or , or medieval ) is a sign in Hebrew writing. It has two meanings. #An apostrophe-like sign (also known colloquially as a ''chupchik'') placed after a letter: #* as a diacritic that modifies the pronunciation of some ...

() immediately after the letter as a substitute to effect the same change in pronunciation. For example, is equivalent to in altering the sound from the

voiced velar stop The voiced velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. Some languages have the voiced pre-velar plosive, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypic ...

to the

voiced postalveolar affricate The voiced palato-alveolar sibilant affricate, voiced post-alveolar affricate or voiced domed postalveolar sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic A ...

͡ʒ known in English as " soft g". In Ladino, as in

Tiberian Hebrew Tiberian Hebrew is the canonical pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) committed to writing by Masoretic scholars living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Galilee under the Abbasid Caliphate. They wrote in the form of Tib ...

, the rafe changes into into � and into Unlike in Hebrew, the rafe also changes into ( ͡ʒor ͡ʃ, into � and in words of Semitic origin also ( or � into � In words of Romance origin, is spelled as , freeing up for the

voiceless postalveolar fricative A voiceless postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some Speech, spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term ''voiceless postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound #Voiceless palato-alveolar frica ...

�without the need for a rafe to disambiguate. Note Ladino orthography is far less standardized than Yiddish; original Ladino works may be written in Rashi script (using rafe), Hebrew block print (using geresh), or in the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

(e.g. the 1553 Ferrara Bible).

Unicode

"Hebrew Point Rafe" is encoded in the Unicode standard as U+05BF.

References

{{Hebrew language Niqqud

Yiddish

Ladino

Unicode

See also

References