Begadkefat


Begadkefat is the phenomenon of lenition affecting the non-emphatic stop consonants of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic when they are preceded by a vowel and not geminated. The name is also given to similar cases of spirantization of post-vocalic plosives in other languages; for instance, in Jerba Berber.
The phenomenon's name comprises these six consonants with haphazard vowels for pronunciation: BeGaDKePaT. The Hebrew term rtl=yes denotes the letters themselves. If a begadkefat is at the beginning of a word and is preceded by a word ending in an open syllable, then there is no dagesh.
Begedkefet spirantization developed during the Biblical Hebrew period due to Aramaic influence. Its time of emergence can be found by noting that the Old Aramaic phonemes, disappeared in the 7th century BC. During this period all six plosive/fricative pairs were allophonic.
In Modern Hebrew, three of the six letters, , and each still denotes a stop–fricative variant pair; however, in Modern Hebrew these variants are no longer purely allophonic. Although orthographic variants of , and still exist, these letters' pronunciation always remains acoustically and phonologically indistinguishable.
In Ashkenazi Hebrew and in Yiddish borrowings from it, without dagesh still denotes a fricative variant, which is pronounced, which diverged from Biblical/Mishnaic.
The only pronunciation tradition to preserve and distinguish all begadkefat letters is Yemenite Hebrew. However, in Yemenite Hebrew, gimel with dagesh is a voiced postalveolar affricate under the influence of Judeo-Yemeni Arabic; it diverged from Mishnaic Hebrew.

Orthography

The phenomenon is attributed to the following allophonic consonants:
In Hebrew writing with niqqud, a dot in the center of one of these letters, called dagesh , marks the plosive articulation:
  • at the beginning of a word or after a consonant,
  • when the sound is – or was historically – geminated, and
  • in some modern Hebrew words independently of these conditions.
A line placed above it, called "rafe" , marks in Yiddish the fricative articulation.

In Modern Hebrew

As mentioned above, the fricative variants of, and no longer exist in modern Hebrew. The three remaining pairs ~, ~, and ~ still sometimes alternate, as demonstrated in inflections of many roots in which the roots' meaning is retained despite variation of begedkefet letters' manner of articulation, e.g.,
however, in Modern Hebrew, stop and fricative variants of, and are distinct phonemes, and there are minimal pairs:
and consider, e.g.:
This phonemic divergence is due to a number of factors, amongst others:
  • due to loss of consonant gemination in modern Hebrew, which formerly distinguished the stop members of the pairs from the fricatives when intervocalic – e.g. in the inflections:
  • due to the introduction, through foreign borrowings, of:
Even aside from borrowings or lost gemination, common Israeli pronunciation sometimes violates the original phonological principle "stop variant after a consonant; fricative after a vowel", although this principle is still prescribed as standard by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, e.g.:
  • The words and , whose respective prescribed pronunciation is and, are commonly pronounced and, replacing the consonant with a vowel, but still preferring the stop variant to its fricative counterpoint.
  • Similarly, the words and , whose respective prescribed pronunciation is and, are commonly pronounced and, again replacing the consonant with the vowel, but still preferring the stop to the fricative.
  • Conversely, words like or , whose respective prescribed pronunciation is and, are commonly pronounced and, preferring the stop to the fricative, although following vowels, due to the shifting of the original Semitic pronunciation of the letter from to, rendering it identical to common Israeli pronunciation of the fricative variant of the letter.