Begadkefat (also begedkefet) is the phenomenon of lenition affecting the non-emphatic stop consonants of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic when they are preceded by a vowel and not geminated.
Although orthographic variants of ג (gimel), ד (daleth) and ת (taw) still exist, these letters' pronunciation always remains acoustically and phonologically indistinguishable.
[note 1] In Ashkenazi Hebrew and in Yiddish borrowings from it, ת without dagesh still denotes a fricative variant, which is pronounced [s], which diverged from Biblical/Mishnaic [θ].
The phenomenon is attributed to the following allophonic consonants: In Hebrew writing with niqqud, a dot in the center of one of these letters, called dagesh ( ּ ), marks the plosive articulation: A line (similar to a macron) placed above it, called "rafe" ( ֿ ), marks in Yiddish (and rarely in Hebrew) the fricative articulation.
The three remaining pairs /b/~/v/, /k/~/χ/, and /p/~/f/ still sometimes alternate, as demonstrated in inflections of many roots in which the roots' meaning is retained despite variation of begedkefet letters' manner of articulation, e.g., however, in Modern Hebrew, stop and fricative variants of ב, כ and פ are distinct phonemes, and there are minimal pairs: and consider, e.g.: This phonemic divergence is due to a number of factors, amongst others: Even aside from borrowings or lost gemination, common Israeli pronunciation sometimes violates the original phonological principle "stop variant after a consonant; fricative after a vowel", although this principle is still prescribed as standard by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, e.g.: