or  (, or , also " lene", "weak/light dagesh", opposed to "strong dot") may be placed inside the consonants  bet,  gimel,  dalet,   kaf,  pe and  tav. They each had two sounds: the original "hard" (plosive) sound, and a "soft" (fricative) sound. Before the Babylonian captivity, the soft sounds did not exist in Hebrew, but were added as a result of Aramaic-influenced pronunciation of Hebrew after this point in history. The letters take on their hard sounds when they have no vowel sound before them, and take their soft sounds when a vowel immediately precedes them, across word boundaries in Biblical Hebrew, but not in Modern Hebrew. When vowel diacritics are used, the hard sounds are indicated by a central dotsupport neither, one, or both methods.

See also 
 Hebrew spelling
 Yiddish orthography
 Geresh
 Niqqud
 Biblical Hebrew
 Shadda as analogous to dagesh hazak

Notes

Further reading 
 , 
 M. Spiegel and J. Volk, 2003. "Hebrew Vowel Restoration with Neural Networks," Proceedings of the Class of 2003 Senior Conference, Computer Science Department, Swarthmore College, pp. 1–7: Open Access Copy

External links 
 alanwood.com Hebrew
 alanwood.com Alphabetic presentation

Category:Niqqud
Category:Hebrew grammar
Category:Hebrew diacritics