| Meteg (מֶתֶג) | ||
|---|---|---|
| ֽ | אֲהֵבֽוּךָ | |
| compare with comma | ||
| אֲהֵבֽוּךָ, | ||
Meteg (or meseg or metheg, Hebrew: מֶתֶג, lit. 'bridle', also gaʿyaגעיה, lit. 'bellowing', מאריךmaʾarikh, or מעמידmaʿamid) is a punctuation mark used in Biblical Hebrew for stress marking. It is a vertical bar placed under the affected syllable.
| Hebrew punctuation | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Meteg is primarily used in Biblical Hebrew to mark secondary stress and vowel length.
Meteg is also sometimes used in Biblical Hebrew to mark a long vowel. While short and long vowels are largely allophonic, they are not always predictable from spelling, e.g. ויראו 'and they saw' vs. ויראו 'and they feared'. Meteg's indication of length also indirectly indicates that a following shva is vocal, as in the previous case. This may distinguish qamatz gadol and qatan, e.g. שמרה 'she guarded' vs. שמרה 'guard (volitive)'.
In modern usage meteg is only used in liturgical contexts and dictionaries. Siddurim and dictionaries may use meteg to mark primary stress, often only for non-final stress, since the majority of Hebrew words have final stress.
Its form is a vertical bar placed either to the left, the right, or in the middle of the niqqud (diacritics for vowels or cantillation) under a consonant. [1] It is identical in appearance to silluq and is unified with it in Unicode. [2]
Meteg differs from other Hebrew diacritics in that its placement is not totally fixed. [3] While meteg is usually placed to the left of a vowel, some texts place it to the right, and some place it in the middle of hataf vowels. [3] The Rabbinic Bible of 1524–25 always shifts meteg to the left, while the Aleppo and Leningrad codices are not consistent in meteg placement. [3]
The different placements of meteg are subgrouped relatively to its order with surrounding vowel points occurring below letters before or after it and are summarized in the table below. Three types of metegs are generally considered, with the left meteg being the most common case for simple vowels (however there's some rare cases where this group must be subdivided according to the placement of cantillation accents), and the medial meteg occurring only (but most frequently) with (composite) hataf vowels.
| Group | Position | Frequency | Example | Reference | Preferred encoding in logical order (recommended by SIL and Unicode) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Left (final) meteg | centered alone below (possibly after holam or holam haser vowel point, above) | common | לֵאמֹֽר׃ | Exodus (20:1:6) | optional vowel points, (CGJ optional but not needed), meteg point |
| after (left of) vowel point below | common | וַֽיִּמְצְא֗וּ | 1 Kings (1:3:7) | ||
| between vowel points below (the last vowel point may shift to the left below the next letter, but still reads before it; most occurrences are in the common Biblic orthography of YeRUŠaLa(Y)iM, where the second yod letter is implied and not written: the meteg notes the stress/length of the first vowel before this implied yod, when the second vowel is shortened/unstressed by the following vowelless mem letter) | common | יְרוּשָׁלָֽ͏ִם | 2 Chronicles (14:15:9) | first vowel point, (CGJ optional but not needed), meteg point, second vowel point | |
| before (right of) cantillation accent | rare | לֹֽ֣א | Exodus (20:4:1) | meteg point, (CGJ optional but not needed), cantillation accent | |
| after (left of) hataf vowel point | rare | הֱֽיֹות־אֶֽהְיֶ֥ה | Psalms (50:21:5) | hataf vowel point, ZWNJ, meteg point | |
| after (left of) vowel point and cantillation accent below | occasional | נְ͏ֽ֭נַתְּקָה | Psalms (2:3:1) | optional vowel point, cantillation accent, CGJ, meteg point | |
| after (left of) cantillation accent | rare | עֲבָדִ͏ֽ֑ים׃ | Exodus (20:2:9) | ||
| Right (initial) meteg | before vowel point, first syllable | common | תֽ͏ַעֲשֶׂ֨ה־לְךָ֥֣ | Exodus (20:4:2) | meteg point, CGJ, vowel point |
| before vowel point, word-medial | rare | וְלֽ͏ַנַּעֲרָ֙ | Deuteronomy (22:26:10) | ||
| before (right of) hataf vowel point | rare | הֽ͏ֲלֹא־אַ֭תָּה | Psalms (85:7:1) | ||
| Medial meteg | medial, inside hataf segol vowel point | common | אֱֽלֹהֵיכֶ֔ם | 2 Chronicles (32:15:22) | hataf vowel point, ZWJ, meteg point |
| medial, inside hataf patah vowel point | common | אֲֽשֶׁר־לַדְּבִ֖יר | 1 Kings (6:22:7) |
Note finally that under narrow letters (such as nun) with vowel points below, or under letters that are also surrounded by multiple vowel points or cantillation accents below them, the meteg may not fit well on any side of the vowel point below the base letter. In that case the meteg may adopt an ambiguous position, below the existing vowel point or above the cantillation accent that normally fits below the base letter. Such ambiguous positioning occurs in old books like the Codex Leningradensis (around year 1006) whose text on paper was extremely compacted with minimal spacing between letters.
In Unicode, Meteg and Silluq (when it occurs before punctuation Sof passuk at end of verses) are unified. [4]
| Glyph | Unicode [5] | Name |
|---|---|---|
| ֽ | U+05BD | Hebrew Point Meteg |
Unicode also does not distinguish between the different placements of Meteg. And because Meteg has a distinctive combining class, its encoding order relative to other diacritics is not significant (because of canonical equivalence). Consequently, the Meteg may be freely reordered during Unicode normalization when it appears in sequences with other combining diacritics, without affecting its interpretation or rendering.
Where the relative placement of Meteg is significant and does not match the standard order of combining classes of Hebrew diacritics (where the Meteg should appear after Hebrew vowel points but before Hebrew cantillation marks in normalized texts), a combining grapheme joiner (CGJ, U+034F) should be added between Meteg and other diacritics before or after it, to fix its rendering placement and intended meaning.
In the most frequent use of Meteg, it should follow the vowel mark, but the canonical ordering of combining classes swaps them during standard normalizations: the canonical combining class of Meteg is 22, higher than the canonical combining classes 10 to 20 assigned to Hebrew vowel points; it is also higher than the canonical combining class 21 assigned to the combining Dagesh (or Mapiq) consonant modifier, but this generally causes no problem. [6]
In the most frequent cases of use in modern Hebrew, the Meteg should only follow a vowel point and cantillation marks are not used; but in Biblical Hebrew it must sometimes be encoded with an additional CGJ after it before a vowel point, so that it remains interpreted first (and rendered to the right) before the niqqud after it (to the left); Meteg must also be preceded by a CGJ if it must appear after (to the left) a cantillation accent (whose combining class is 220 or more).
Additionally, the special placements of meteg with the three hataf vowels (whose canonical combinal classes are between 11 and 13) requires encoding it after the hataf vowel point, separated by a zero-width joiner control (ZWJ, U+200D) for the medial position (between the two parts of the hataf vowel), or by a zero-width non-joiner control (ZWNJ, U+200C) for the final position (to the left of the hataf vowel); some encoded texts use CGJ instead of ZWNJ for the later case.
The three controls CGJ, ZWJ and ZWNJ (which have canonical combining class 0) are all blocking the canonical reordering of meteg with vowels points, and only ZWJ is needed for the special placement of meteg (combining class) in the middle of an hataf vowel. But in the cases where the encoding of CGJ is optional but not needed, or for the case where ZWNJ is replaced by CGJ, the presence or absence of this CGJ control creates texts that are not visually distinctive, but they are still not canonically equivalent. This may create difficulties for plain-text search, unless it uses a conforming Unicode collation algorithm (UCA) with the appropriate tailoring for the Hebrew script, where these controls are assigned ignorable weights after the initial normalization.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨á⟩, grave ⟨à⟩, and circumflex ⟨â⟩, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
The acute accent, ◌́, is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available.
The zero-width non-joiner () is a non-printing character used in the computerization of writing systems that make use of ligatures. When placed between two characters that would otherwise be connected into a ligature, a ZWNJ causes them to be printed in their final and initial forms, respectively. This is also an effect of a space character, but a ZWNJ is used when it is desirable to keep the characters closer together or to connect a word with its morpheme.
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks.
Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) is a coding scheme for representing various writing systems of India. It encodes the main Indic scripts and a Roman transliteration. The supported scripts are: Bengali–Assamese, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. ISCII does not encode the writing systems of India that are based on Persian, but its writing system switching codes nonetheless provide for Kashmiri, Sindhi, Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic. The Persian-based writing systems were subsequently encoded in the PASCII encoding.
Hebrew cantillation, trope, trop, or te'amim is the manner of chanting ritual readings from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. The chants are written and notated in accordance with the special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic Text of the Bible, to complement the letters and vowel points.
In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the Early Middle Ages. The most widespread system, and the only one still used to a significant degree today, was created by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the second half of the first millennium AD in the Land of Israel. Text written with niqqud is called ktiv menuqad.
The Tiberian vocalization, Tiberian pointing, or Tiberian niqqud is a system of diacritics (niqqud) devised by the Masoretes of Tiberias to add to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible to produce the Masoretic Text. The system soon became used to vocalize other Hebrew texts as well.
Tiberian Hebrew is the canonical pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) committed to writing by Masoretic scholars living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Galilee c. 750–950 CE under the Abbasid Caliphate. They wrote in the form of Tiberian vocalization, which employed diacritics added to the Hebrew letters: vowel signs and consonant diacritics (nequdot) and the so-called accents. These together with the marginal notes masora magna and masora parva make up the Tiberian apparatus.
Unicode has a certain amount of duplication of characters. These are pairs of single Unicode code points that are canonically equivalent. The reason for this are compatibility issues with legacy systems.
The zero-width joiner (‍) is a non-printing character used in the computerized typesetting of writing systems in which the shape or positioning of a grapheme depends on its relation to other graphemes, such as the Arabic script or any Indic script. Sometimes the Roman script is to be counted as complex, e.g. when using a Fraktur typeface. When placed between two characters that would otherwise not be connected, a ZWJ causes them to be printed in their connected forms.
Diacritical marks of two dots¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in a number of languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others. For example, in Albanian, ë represents a schwa. Such diacritics are also sometimes used for stylistic reasons.
The combining grapheme joiner (CGJ), U+034F͏COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER is a Unicode character that has no visible glyph and is "default ignorable" by applications. Its name is a misnomer and does not describe its function: the character does not join graphemes. Its purpose is to semantically separate characters that should not be considered digraphs as well as to block canonical reordering of combining marks during normalization.
Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibility with preexisting standard character sets, which often included similar or identical characters.
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography, which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography, introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics.
Hebrew punctuation is similar to that of English and other Western languages, Modern Hebrew having imported additional punctuation marks from these languages in order to avoid the ambiguities sometimes occasioned by the relative lack of such symbols in Biblical Hebrew.
Hebrew orthography includes three types of diacritics:
The Unicode Standard assigns various properties to each Unicode character and code point.
The Babylonian vocalization, also known as Babylonian supralinear punctuation, or Babylonian pointing or Babylonian niqqud Hebrew: נִקּוּד בָּבְלִי) is a system of diacritics (niqqud) and vowel symbols assigned above the text and devised by the Masoretes of Babylon to add to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible to indicate the proper pronunciation of words, reflecting the Hebrew of Babylon. The Babylonian notation is no longer in use in any Jewish community, having been supplanted by the sublinear Tiberian vocalization. However, the Babylonian pronunciation as reflected in that notation appears to be the ancestor of that used by Yemenite Jews.