Begadkefat is the name given to a 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 the Berber language of Djerba. Celtic languages have a similar system. The phenomenon is attributed to the following consonants: The name of the phenomenon is made up with these six consonants, mixed with haphazard vowels for the sake of pronunciation: BeGaDKePaT. The Hebrew term denotes the letters themselves. Begedkefet spirantization developed sometime during the lifetime of Biblical Hebrew under the influence of Aramaic. Its time of emergence can be found by noting that the Old Aramaic phonemes, disappeared in the 7th century BC. It persisted in Hebrew until the 2nd century CE. During this period all six plosive / fricative pairs were allophonic. In Modern Hebrew, Sephardi Hebrew, and most forms of Mizrahi Hebrew, three of the six letters, , and each still denote 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 Ashkenazi Hebrew, without dagesh still denotes a fricative variant,. The only extant pronunciation to distinguish all begadkefat letters is Yemenite Hebrew; however, in Yemenite Hebrew the sound ofgimel with dagesh is a voiced palato-alveolar affricate, as in Arabic.
Orthography
In Hebrew writing with niqqud, a dot in the center of one of these letters, called dagesh , marks the plosive articulation:
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:
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.
