What's up with Sefer Yetzirah including the Rei'sh among the bege'd kefe't letters that can take a dagei"sh?

Aryeh Kaplan discusses it and points out various places where reish does, in fact, take a dagesh. The flaw in this is that an aleph can take a dagesh too, but isn't listed.

Where in Tanach does the aleph take a dagesh, and why does it in those places, and how does the dagesh change the pronunciation or meaning?
And how do we know one of the Ben Asher boys didn't drop a drop of ink, like the proverbial rebbe who cut off the ends of the proverbial brisket to fit in the proverbial pan?

Mimoshvoseichem taviu lechem tenufah (in the parshas haOmer in Emor*)
Is there an online concordance?
I assume it's a mesorah thing, and given that I don't think the aleph ever had a pronunciation of any sort, I have no idea what it does, and maybe one of the Ben Asher boys DID sneeze at the wrong time. But then again, maybe they sneezed when they were writing the reish in ba-avur haR'ima in Shmuel I 1.

*nice pun
If we can demonstrate that SY used gematria, maybe it's counted as a double because it's 200, a la the GRA's explanation of the word bechor.

I have seen a dagesh in an aleph before, but I don't remember where though.

This post has been edited by Enforcer: Aug 1 2006, 11:30 PM

I wonder, though, if there is an instance of an ayin or ches taking a dagesh (or a heh, but that's easily comfusable with a mapik)

Because the Ben Asher boys used to correct and annotate their manuscripts, not just add dots.

As for 'aleph, it is a consonant and therefore must have had (and to an extent still does) have a pronunciation, probably a glottal stop.

(I seem to have something rattling around in my head about Ben Naphtali having a resh with a dagesh, but not Ben Asher manuscripts. Maybe I'm confused because R. Saadya liked Ben Naphtali and not Ben Asher and he also wrote on Sefer Yetzirah).

Maybe the aleph is just a vowel-placeholder?

The assumption is that when alphabets were being developed every letter was a consonant, otherwise it would have been superfluos. It took a while for the idea to double consonants as vowels to develop. I think the theory is that since 'aliph is a glottal stop in Arabic then it was probably originally a glottal stop, but of course that isn't the point. The point is that it isn't nothing because no one devised a consonant to represent nothing.

they're both dots, so why's the one with the hey called a mapik and not a dagesh?

But they must have had some sort of system of vowels. So maybe the aleph never was a consonant at all, and just represented the fact that another vowel was coming unexpectedly.

Because it plays a different role. It's like how a . can be called both a period and a dot, depending if its at the end of a sentence or atop a lower-case I.

the mapik is meant to indicate that the heh at the end of a word is to be pronounced.

ע,a mong other things, can also represent the idea of "nothing-nothingness"

Because ayin means nothing?

Why?

The trouble with that idea is that other letters eventually came to mark vowels (eg, using a yod to fill out a word and show it should be pronounced --ee). If so, if this proved to be a more efficient way to spell using alphabets, how come those consonants were never marked with an 'aleph in an earlier stage of spelling?

For example, why wouldn't "כהנים" have originally be written as "כהנאם" rather than "כהנם?"

well, yes