Begadkefat

This article contains Hebrew text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Hebrew letters.

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 Jerba Berber.^[1]

The phenomenon's name comprises these six consonants with haphazard vowels for pronunciation: BeGaDKePaT. The Hebrew term בֶּגֶ״ד כֶּפֶ״ת (Modern Hebrew /ˌbeɡedˈkefet/) denotes the letters themselves (rather than the phenomenon of spirantization). 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 /θ/, /ð/ disappeared in the 7th century BC.^[2] 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, ב‎ (bet), כ‎ (kaf) and פ‎ (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 ג‎ (gimel), ד‎ (daleth) and ת‎ (taw) still exist, these letters' pronunciation always remains acoustically and phonologically indistinguishable.^{[note 1]}

In Ashkenazi Hebrew and in Yiddish borrowings from it, ת‎ without dagesh still denotes a fricative variant, which is pronounced [s], which diverged from Biblical/Mishnaic [θ].

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 [d͡ʒ] under the influence of Judeo-Yemeni Arabic; it diverged from Mishnaic Hebrew [ɡ].

Cite error: There are <ref group=note> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=note}} template (see the help page).