Rafe
In Hebrew orthography the rafe or raphe is a diacritic, a subtle horizontal overbar placed above certain letters to indicate that they are to be pronounced as fricatives.
It originated with the Tiberian Masoretes as part of the extended system of niqqud, and has the opposite meaning of dagesh, showing that one of the letters is to be pronounced as a fricative and not as a plosive, or that a consonant is not geminated; or, as the opposite to a mappiq, to show that the letters or are silent.
The rafe generally fell out of use for Hebrew with the coming of printing, although according to Gesenius at that time it could still be found in a few places in printed Hebrew Bibles, where the absence of a dagesh or a mappiq was noticeable.
In some siddurs a diacritical symbol, typographically the same as the rafe, but utterly unrelated, is used to mark instances of "moving sheva".
The rafe is similar in function to the buailte in the old-style Irish alphabet.
Yiddish
In Yiddish orthography, the rafe distinguishes from and in words of Semitic origin also from (.Ladino
In Ladino the rafe, called a varrica, 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, is equivalent to in altering the sound from the voiced velar stop to the voiced postalveolar affricate , known in English as "soft g".In Ladino, as in Tiberian Hebrew, the rafe changes into , into , and into . Unlike in Hebrew, the rafe also changes into , into , and in words of Semitic origin also into . In words of Romance origin, is spelled as, freeing up for the voiceless postalveolar fricative 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, Hebrew block print, or in the Latin alphabet.