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'). In Modern Hebrew, the dagesh only changes the pronunciation of ב‎ bet, כ‎ kaf, and פ‎ pe: in those letters, it turns a fricative sound (vet, khaf, and fe) into a plosive sound (bet, kaf, and pe), regardless of the dagesh's grammatical/orthographic origin, kal or ḥazaq; gemination itself (lengthening of the consonant) is generally not pronounced in any consonant. 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 usually omitted when writing without niqqud (e.g. בּ is written as ב), however, dagesh may be added to words that would be ambiguous without niqqud. The use or omission of such marks is usually consistent throughout any given context.