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Re: Rafe (was RE: Yiddish spelling)

From:Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 26, 2000, 2:17
On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:56:35 -0600 raccoon@ELKNET.NET writes:
> Ok, I've held my tongue long enough. What's rafe? > > Eric Christopherson > raccoon@elknet.net
. It's a Hebrew script diacritic that looks just like a macron on top of the letter, but in handwriting commonly comes out more like a raised, 45-degree angled apostraphe. It's used to mark softened consonants and non-Hebrew consonants. For instance, the letter _pei_ /p/ can be [p] or [f] depending on place in the word. Usually in Hebrew a _dagesh_, a dot inside the character, would be used to specify the [p], but in Yiddish and Ladino a _rafeh_ is used to specify the [f]. It has other uses in Modern Hebrew and Ladino usage, also, to mark non-Hebrew consonants such as /dZ/ (gimel), /Z/ (zayin in Israel, shin in Ladino), /tS/ or Arabic /d<A>/ (tsadi), /G/ (`ayin). From what i've seen, besides the Israeli usage for /dZ/, /tS/ and Arabic sounds, rafeh is used most commonly in vocalized texts in order not to mark a soft consonant but to mark a _shva na`_, /@/, which is indistinguishable from the vowelless sign (they look like {:}) if you don't know complicated grammatical rules. -Stephen (Steg) "...meanwhile the song plays!"