LEARNING
DAGESH (Hebrew points/dots found INSIDE the letters)
Awesome,
SO good to see you back! By now you must know all of the Masoretic
vowels, which covers the marks below the letters (and one
(cholam) above).
For
the record there are some other diacritical marks found mostly
above the letters called Cantillation marks. These are used
in linguistics for prosody (intonation, emphasis, focus, tone,
stress and rhythm) to sing Torah. You can learn more about
these later.
For now we will focus on ALL of the dots found INSIDE the
Hebrew letters and how to tell the difference between them
all.
If you learn these five simple steps, everything else just
falls into place.
Once
you have learned these five types of dagesh, EVERYTHING else
with a dot inside of a letter is a Dagesh Forte (Hazak in
Hebrew).
Dagesh
forte simply means when you see a letter with one of these
dots, add a duplicate letter. For example if you see a Tet
with a dot inside, pretend that there are two Tet's in a row.
This
is like a scribal shortcut from writing two letters and also
an indicator of a new syllable.
For example in stead of writing 
for the word prayer, it can be shortened to 
It indicates that this letter (lamed) is "doubled,"
and we count the first "L" as a closing sound of
the first syllable (i.e., tephil) and the second "L"
as the starting sound of the second syllable (i.e., lah).
So the word would be transliterated as tephil·lah.
After
you have learned the five types of Dagesh (or dots) above,
you will automatically know ALL of your dagesh Hazak!
These
are the letters that are left over:
and
are therefore all of the
Dagesh Hazak.
I have added Dagesh Flashcards into the Flashcard Kit. I would
suggest starting with the Mappiq and Dagesh Lene. When you
know these well, add in the other letters with dots such as
the Vav's and the Shins (without Dagesh).
After
you learn these well, the Dagesh Forte should just come natural
if you are able to subtract in your mind :-)
Another
point with these Flashcards would be that you should quiz
yourself with the cards all facing the same way (The side
showing the Hebrew Letter).
Learn
these well and hurry back for the next lesson where we start
learning Tagin, Prefixes and Hebrew meanings. We will be moving
off the milk and honey now and on to some more solid foods.
We will be starting with some butter and soft bread :-)
References (click the
back arrow on your browser to go back to your reading)
1. Gen 43:26, Lev 23:17, Job 33:21, and Ezra
8:18
2. Hebrew Qal 
means light, swift, voice, sound
3. Hazak 
is the Hebrew word for strong, double power, or strength,
aka Chazak
4. This is much like the Vav Cholam and Shuruk where entities
seem to be changing.
5. Though in the actual word Sibboleth, a Shin and a Samekh
was used.
