Rafe


In Hebrew orthography the rafe, or more commonly spelt 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 qal, showing that one of the letters בגדכפת is to be pronounced as a fricative and not as a plosive, or 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.
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 particularly to be noted.
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/Ladino

It retained some currency in Yiddish and Ladino.
In Yiddish the rafe distinguish פּ from פֿ and in Hebrew or Aramaic words also to distinguish ב and בֿ and תּ from תֿ.
In Ladino the rafe, called a varrica, looks more like a breve-shaped diacritic on top of the letter, typically used to form fricative consonant sounds. Ladino has eight fricative letters formed by adding a varrica. 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 of the hard voiced velar stop of ג to the voiced postalveolar affricate sound of English or soft.
In Ladino, the rafe changes ב into בﬞ, ג into גﬞ, ד into דﬞ, ז into זﬞ, פ into פﬞ, ט into טﬞ, כ into כﬞ, and ש into שﬞ. The last two letters are uncommonly used except in Semitic loanwords, with the letter ס used to represent freeing up ש to be generally reserved for the voiceless postalveolar fricative sound of English without the need for a rafe to specify.

Unicode

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