6.2 Nun with Silent Sheva Becomes Dagesh Forte

• Nun is considered a “weak letter”
• One aspect of weak letters is that they disappear from a word under specific scenarios
• One such scenario is when the nun appears with a SILENT Sheva נְ (or no vowel at all)

When then nun drops, whenever possible, it will be replaced with a Dagesh Forte

• The technical term for this is called “assimilation”
  • So grammarians say, “the נ has assimilated into a Dagesh Forte”
• To get back to the original/lexical form, we would substitute the Dagesh Forte for the Nun+Sheva

A Dagesh Forte frequently indicates an assimilated נ

When the Dagesh Forte is rejected, we have lost our big clue that a letter like נ has gone missing

• We’ve said before that the Dagesh Forte is our friend; it alerts us that something unusual is going on
• When the Dagesh Forte is rejected, we run the risk of missing out on something the language is trying to tell us
• Occasionally, but not always, we will have Compensatory Lengthening to help us out