2.13 Gutturals and Resh reject Dagesh Forte

That's no moon. That's a Guttural!

Figure 2.9: That’s no moon. That’s a Guttural!

A Hebrew collision like this means something has to give. . . and the gutturals tend to get their way!

  • We said in Lesson One that the Gutturals don’t play nice with the other Hebrew Rules, and this rejection of the Dagesh Forte is one of those ways
  • It’s like they have a force-field shielding them from other Hebrew grammar rules!
  • A large chunk of any Hebrew grammar course involves learning to resolve these guttural entanglements, which often involve changes to surrounding vowels through a process called “Compansatory Lengthening”

So what is הּ?

  • In your reading, you may come across a Hei with a dot in it
  • This dot is not a Dagesh Forte because we just learned that gutturals never take a Dagesh Forte
  • ה is not a BeGaD KePHaT letter, so it CANNOT be a Dagesh Lene either
  • This dot is known as a “Mappiq”
  • A word-final ה is typically a vowel
  • A Mappiq signifies that a word-final ה is a consonant, not a vowel
  • We’ll talk more about the Mappiq in Lesson 7