Rafe

In Hebrew orthography the rafe or raphe (Hebrew: רָפֶה, pronounced [ʁaˈfe], meaning "weak, limp") 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

The rafe generally fell out of use for Hebrew with the coming of printing, although according to Gesenius (1813) 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.^[1] (e.g. Exodus 20:13,14,15; Deuteronomy 5:13,17,18,19; 2 Samuel 11:1; Isaiah 22:10; Jeremiah 20:17; Psalm 119:99; Zechariah 5:11)

In some siddurs (e.g. those printed by ArtScroll) a diacritical symbol, typographically the same as the rafe, but utterly unrelated, is used to mark instances of "moving sheva" (Shva Na).^[2]

The rafe is similar in function to the buailte (dot above, denoting lenition) in the old-style Irish alphabet.

Yiddish

It retained some currency in

In

In Ladino the rafe, called a varrica (“little crossbar”), looks more like a breve-shaped diacritic (ﬞ ) on top of the letter (◌ﬞ). When written in the

In Ladino, as in Tiberian Hebrew, the rafe changes ב [b] into בﬞ [v], ד [d] into דﬞ [ð], and פ [p] into פﬞ [f]. Unlike in Hebrew, the rafe also changes ג [g] into גﬞ ([d͡ʒ] or [t͡ʃ]), ז [z] into זﬞ [ʒ], and in words of Semitic origin also ש ([s] or [ʃ]) into שﬞ [ʃ]. In words of Romance origin, [s] is spelled as ס, freeing up ש for the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ] 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 (using rafe), Hebrew block print (using geresh), or in the Latin alphabet (e.g. the 1553 Ferrara Bible).

Unicode

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

See also

• Dagesh
• Hebrew alphabet
• Hebrew phonology
• Macron
• Mappiq
• Yiddish orthography

References