Begadkefat

Begadkefat (also begedkefet) 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 the Berber language of Djerba. Celtic languages have a similar system.

The name of the phenomenon is made up of these six consonants, mixed with haphazard vowels for the sake of pronunciation: BeGaDKePaT. The Hebrew term (Modern Hebrew ) denotes the letters themselves (rather than the phenomenon of spirantization). If a beged-kephat 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 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. 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, (bet),  (kaf) and  (pe) each still denotes a stop–fricative variant pair; however, in Modern Hebrew these variants are no longer purely allophonic (see below). Although orthographic variants of (gimel),  (dalet) and  (tav) 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  (under the influence of Judeo-German, aka Yiddish) which diverged from Biblical/Mishnaic.

The only extant Hebrew pronunciation tradition to preserve and distinguish all begadkefat letters is Yemenite Hebrew; however, in Yemenite Hebrew the sound of gimel with dagesh is a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (under the influence of Judeo-Yemeni Arabic), which diverged from Biblical/Mishnaic.

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 (in which cases it is termed "dagesh qal" ),
 * when the sound is – or was historically – geminated (in which case it is termed "dagesh ẖazaq", a mark for historical gemination in most other consonants of the language as well), and
 * in some modern Hebrew words independently of these conditions (see below).

A line (similar to a macron) placed above it, called "rafe" ( ֿ ), marks in Yiddish (and rarely in Hebrew) the fricative articulation.

In Modern Hebrew
As mentioned above, the fricative variants of, and  no longer exist in modern Hebrew. (However, Hebrew does have the guttural R consonant which is the voiced counterpart of  and sounds similar to Mizrahi Hebrew's fricative variant of  ḡimel as well as Arabic's غ ġayn, both of which are . Modern Hebrew ר resh can still sporadically be found standing in for this phoneme, for example in the Hebrew rendering of Raleb (Ghaleb) Majadele's name.)  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:
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 * • ||, historically ||("jumped" → "hopped"),
 * • ||, historically ||("broke" → "shattered"),
 * • ||, historically ||("resided" → "housed"),
 * }
 * due to the introduction, through foreign borrowings, of:
 * • syllable-initial (e.g.   "fabricated"),
 * • non-syllable-initial (e.g.   "hypnotized")
 * • non-syllable-initial (e.g.   "fabricated"), ג׳וֹבּ  "job",   "cubic meter",   "pub").
 * • non-syllable-initial (e.g.   "hypnotized")
 * • non-syllable-initial (e.g.   "fabricated"), ג׳וֹבּ  "job",   "cubic meter",   "pub").

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 (ferry) and  (refugee absorption camps), 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 (Aliyah Bet, called the Ha'apala which designates the covert Jewish immigration to British Palestine, 1934–1948) and  (the immigrants of this immigration), 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 (to deny) or  (paintbrush), whose respective prescribed pronunciation is  and, are commonly pronounced  and , preferring the stop  to the fricative , although following vowels (respectively  and ), due to the shifting of the original semitic pronunciation of the letter  (heth) from  to , rendering it identical to common Israeli pronunciation of the fricative variant of the letter.