Dagesh

The diacritical point placed in the center of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to indicate either their intensified (doubled) pronunciation, or, in the case of the letters

From the Masorah the word passed into the terminology of the grammarians in its earlier sense, as, for instance, in Ben Asher and Saadia Gaon. The latter called one part of his grammatical work "The Book of Dagesh and Rafe"; preserving, as did the Karaite lexicographer David b. Abraham, even in the Arabic text the Hebrew-Aramaic terms. Saadia uses Arabic noun and verb forms derived from the word. Ḥayyuj uses in their stead the corresponding Arabic terms "shadid," "mushaddad," "khafif," "mukhaffaf"; and he was followed in this by others writing in Arabic. From the time of Abraham ibn Ezra, however, philologists writing in Hebrew reestablished the use of the word "dagesh," from which various nominal and verbal forms were derived and added to the terminology of Hebrew grammar.

There is no trace among the early writers of a classification of the various uses to which the dagesh was put, such as became became customary later, though the relation in which the six letters

Graetz has shown that the use of the dagesh is anterior to the use of the vowel-points, for which it was, in a measure, a substitute. It distinguished the absolute from the construct state, the quiescent shewa from the mobile, and at times stood in place of the "matres lectionis." The regular use of the dagesh and its representation by means of a point seem to be a peculiarity of the Tiberian vowel-system. In the so-called superlinear, or Babylonian, system, the point was originally not used at all, nor was dagesh indicated in all cases which required it. In Berlin MS. Or. quart. 680, which, according to Kahle, originally contained the true Babylonian punctuation, the dagesh has the form

In the peculiar fragments of shortened Hebrew published by M. Friedländer ("Proc. Soc. Biblical Archeology," 1896), the sign for both dagesh forte and dagesh lene is