Meteg
Encyclopedia
| Meteg | ||
|---|---|---|
| מתג | ||
| compare with comma Comma A comma is a type of punctuation mark . The word comes from the Greek komma , which means something cut off or a short clause.Comma may also refer to:* Comma , a type of interval in music theory... |
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Meteg (or metheg, Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
מתג, lit. 'bridle', also gaya געיה, lit. 'bellowing', מאריך ma'arikh, or מעמיד ma'amid) is a punctuation mark used in Biblical Hebrew for stress
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
marking. It is a vertical bar place under the affected syllable.
Usage
Meteg is primarily used in Biblical Hebrew to mark secondary stressSecondary stress
Secondary stress is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word; the stronger degree of stress is called 'primary'. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the stressed syllable: the nun in ...
and vowel length
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
. Words may contain multiple metegs, e.g. מֹשְׁבֹתֵיכֶם, וּלְאֶבְיֹנְךָ.
Meteg is also sometimes used in Biblical Hebrew to mark a long vowel
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
. 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
Shva
Shva or, in Biblical Hebrew, Sh'wa is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign written as two vertical dots "ְ" underneath a letter. In Modern Hebrew, it indicates either the phoneme or the complete absence of a vowel , whereas in Hebrew prescriptive linguistics, four grammatical entities are differentiated:...
is vocal, as in the previous case. Note that this may distinguish qamatz gadol and qatan, e.g. שמרה 'she guarded' vs. שמרה 'guard (volitive)'.
Meteg is not used at all in Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew , also known as Israeli Hebrew or Modern Israeli Hebrew, is the language spoken in Israel and in some Jewish communities worldwide, from the early 20th century to the present....
. In modern usage meteg is only used in liturgical contexts. Siddur
Siddur
A siddur is a Jewish prayer book, containing a set order of daily prayers. This article discusses how some of these prayers evolved, and how the siddur, as it is known today has developed...
im may use meteg to mark primary stress. Some only use meteg to mark penultimate stress, since the majority of Hebrew words have final stress.
Appearance and Placement
Its form is a vertical bar placed either to the left, the right, or in the middle of the niqqud under a consonant. It is identical in appearance to silluq and is unified with it in Unicode.Meteg differs from other Hebrew diacritics in that its placement is not totally fixed. 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. The Rabbinic Bible of 1524–25 always shifts meteg to the left, while the Aleppo
Aleppo Codex
The Aleppo Codex is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The codex was written in the 10th century A.D.The codex has long been considered to be the most authoritative document in the masorah , the tradition by which the Hebrew Scriptures have been preserved from generation to generation...
and Leningrad
Leningrad Codex
The Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, using the masoretic text and Tiberian vocalization. It is dated AD 1008 according to its colophon...
codices are not consistent in meteg placement.
| Position | Occurrence | Reference | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| centered alone | לאמר | Exo 20:1:6 | common |
| after vowel | וימצאו | 1 Kings 1:3:7 | common |
| before cantillation | לא | Exo 20:4:1 | rare |
| after cantillation | עבדים | Exo 20:2:8 | rare |
| between vowels | ירושלם | 2 Chron 14:14:9 | common |
| medial with hataf | אלהיכם | 2 Chron 32:15:22 | common |
| medial with hataf | אשר־לדביר | 1 kg 6:22:8 | common |
| left of hataf | היות־אהיה | Psa 50:21:5 | rare |
| right of hataf | הלא־אתה | Psa 85:7:1 | rare |
| before vowel, first syllable | תעשה־לך | Exo 20:4:2 | common |
| before vowel, word-medial | ולנערה | Deut 22:26:1 | rare |
| after vowel and accent | ננתקה | Psa 2:3:1 | occasional |
Unicode
In unicode meteg and silluq are unified. Unicode does not distinguish between different placements of meteg.| Glyph | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
Name |
|---|---|---|
| U+05BD | HEBREW POINT METEG |