Rafe
In Hebrew orthography the rafe or raphe is a diacritic, a subtle horizontal overbar placed above certain letters to indicate that they are to be pronounced as fricatives. It originated with the Tiberian Masoretes as part of the extended system of niqqud, and has the opposite meaning of dagesh qal, showing that one of the letters בגדכפת is to be pronounced as a fricative and not as a plosive, or that a consonant is single and not double; or, as the opposite to a mappiq, to show that the letters ה or א are silent. The rafe generally fell out of use for Hebrew with the coming of printing, although according to Gesenius at that time it could still be found in a few places in printed Hebrew Bibles, where the absence of a dagesh or a mappiq was noticeable. In some siddurs a diacritical symbol, typographically the same as the rafe, but utterly unrelated, is used to mark instances of "moving sheva". The rafe is similar in function to the buailte in the old-style Irish alphabet.
