Aramaic Annotations: Pt.

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© 2010, T. Michael W. Halcomb | www.MichaelHalcomb.com

1. Thus far…: Up to this point, we have looked at both the consonants of the
Aramaic alphabet and the “vowel points”. We have also looked at matres
lectionis and shewas, as well as some tips on beginning the transliteration process.
Here, we will look at some more aspects of the Aramaic letter system, especially
as they relate to pronunciation and transliteration.
2. BeGaDKePhaT: In Aramaic, there are 6 consonants that, when marked with a
dagesh (the little dot inside the letter), the sounds change. As you might have
guessed from the heading (BeGaDKePhat), those letters are: Beth, Gimmel,
Daleth, Kaph, Peh and taw. Here is a table of the consonants with & without the
dagesh and their corresponding sounds & transliteration values:

BeGaDKePhaT Table
Consonant ‫ב‬ ‫בּ‬ ‫ג‬ ‫גּ‬ ‫ד‬ ‫דּ‬ ‫כ‬ ‫כּ‬ ‫פ‬ ‫פּ‬ ‫ת‬ ‫תּ‬
Sound v b g g th d ch k f/ph p th t
Transliteration b b g g d d k k p p t t

3. Fancy Grammatical Terms: You will notice from the table above a
pattern: The consonants with the dagesh inside them are pronounced “hard”
while those without the dagesh are pronounced softly. Grammarians refer to the
“hard” pronunciation by the terms “unspirantized” or “stops”. When the
consonant is pronounced with a soft degree, it is referred to as “spirantized” or
“fricative”.
4. In Transliteration & Translation: The general rule of thumb is that if
a “vowel” comes just before one of these BeGaDKePhaT (BGDKPT) letters, the
pronunciation is soft. This is easy to remember because in general, vowels tend to
have a more of a breathy sound to them. So, vowel just before BGDKPT
consonant = soft. The corollary, as you might have guessed, is that if a consonant
comes before one of the BGDKPT letters, then the pronunciation is “hard” or
“unspirantized”. As usual, there are always exceptions. For example, prefixes
and even the last letter of the preceding word can change the pronunciation of a
BGDKPT letter if it is at the beginning of a word.