Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...

the rafe or raphe ( he, רָפֶה, , 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 Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation") or simply the way a particul ...

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 ( he, בַּעֲלֵי הַמָּסוֹרָה, Baʿălēy Hammāsōrā, 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 i ...

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 ...

'' (vowel points), and has the opposite meaning of ''

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 (vowel points). It takes the form of a dot placed inside a Hebrew letter and has the effect of modi ...

qal'', showing that one of the letters בגדכפת 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'', to show that the letters ה or א are silent (''

mater lectionis ''Matres lectionis'' (from Latin "mothers of reading", singular form: ''mater lectionis'', from he, אֵם קְרִיאָה ) are consonants that are used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing down of Semitic languages such as Arabic, ...

''). 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 ( he, סִדּוּר ; 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, '' ...

s (e.g. those printed by

ArtScroll ArtScroll is an imprint of translations, books and commentaries from an Orthodox Jewish perspective published by Mesorah Publications, Ltd., a publishing company based in Rahway, New Jersey. Rabbi Nosson Scherman is the general editor. 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 more sonorous. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a pa ...

) in the old-style

Irish alphabet Irish orthography is very etymological which allows the same written form to represent all dialects of Irish and remain regular. For example, ("head") may be read in Mayo and Ulster, in Galway, or in Munster. A spelling reform in the ...

Yiddish

It retained some currency in

Yiddish Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...

and Ladino. In Yiddish orthography, the rafe distinguishes from and in words of Semitic origin also from (, spelled as -- double 'vuv'-- in words of Germanic origin) and from (, spelled as in words of Germanic origin).

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 (׳) immediately after the letter as a substitute to effect the same change in pronunciation. For example, גﬞ is equivalent to ג׳ in altering the sound from the voiced velar stop to the voiced postalveolar affricate ͡ʒ known in English as "

soft g In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, the letter is used in different contexts to represent two distinct phonemes that in English are called hard and soft . The sound of a hard (which often precedes the non-front vowel ...

". 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 Tiberian ...

, the rafe changes ב into בﬞ ד into דﬞ � and פ into פﬞ Unlike in Hebrew, the rafe also changes ג into גﬞ ( ͡ʒor ͡ʃ, ז into זﬞ � and in words of Semitic origin also ש ( or � into שﬞ � In words of Romance origin, is spelled as ס, freeing up ש for the

voiceless postalveolar fricative A voiceless postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term ''voiceless postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound , but it also describes the voiceless ...

�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 Rashi script or Sephardic script (), is a typeface for the Hebrew alphabet based on 15th-century Sephardic semi-cursive handwriting. It is named for the rabbinic commentator Rashi, whose works are customarily printed in the typeface (though Ra ...

(using rafe), Hebrew block print (using geresh), or in the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

(e.g. the 1553

Ferrara Bible The Ferrara Bible was a 1553 publication of the Ladino version of the Tanakh used by Sephardi Jews. It was paid for and made by Yom-Tob ben Levi Athias (the Portuguese Marrano known before his return to Judaism as ''Alvaro de Vargas'',In a num ...

Unicode

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

References

{{Hebrew language Niqqud

Yiddish

Ladino

Unicode

See also

References