hard or soft. To be specific, they are pronounced either as stops or fricatives ("spirantized"). For example, the letter bet can be pronounced as "b" or "v". Tiberian vocalization marks a hard consonant with a dagesh kal (in the Hebrew term) or lene (Latin). A soft consonant lacks a dagesh kal, and is sometimes explicitly marked using rafe, an overbar. Transliterations sometimes also use an overbar or underbar to mark a soft consonant. (In Modern Sephardic Hebrew, however, only three consonants—bet, kaph, and pe—retain the hard–soft distinction. In the Ashkenazic style of pronunciation, the soft tav is sounded as "s".) A letter that looks like shin may be that letter (when marked with a shin dot) or the letter sin (when marked with a sin dot). Most consonants can undergo gemination. Tiberian vocalization marks gemination with a dagesh hazak (in the Hebrew term) or forte (Latin), which looks the same as dagesh kal. A consonant that is normally silent (most often he) may be sounded if it is a root consonant or possessive ending. Tiberian vocalization marks such a consonant using a mapiq, which looks like a dagesh. A silent vav may be used to hold a holem vowel, but sometimes a vav with holem has consonant value. Additional transliteration principles A further complication is that the Roman alphabet does not have as many letters for certain sounds found in the Hebrew alphabet, and sometimes no letter at all. Some romanizations resolve this problem using additional non-Tiberian principles: The two letters that represent a stop may be written using the forward and backward quote marks, or similar marks. Certain consonants are considered "emphatic" (the consonants ט צ ק ח ע), due to being pronounced traditionally toward the back of the mouth. They may be transliterated distinctively by using an underdot. The letter "vav" (ו) was once pronounced like English "w", in contrast to its current pronunciation identical to the letter "vet" (the soft letter ב). The Karmeli transcription (see link at bottom of page) creates additional letters based on similar Hebrew or Cyrillic letters to represent the sounds that lack Roman letters. Finally, for ease of reading it is common to apply certain principles foreign to Hebrew: Use a hyphen between common prefixes or suffixes and a romanized word. Capitalize the first letter of a proper name, but not its prefixes. Examples Below is the word "שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם" ( ,