![Meteg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Meteg.png)
Meteg (or meseg or metheg,
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
: , lit. 'bridle', also , lit. 'bellowing', , or ) is a punctuation mark used in
Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew (, or , ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of ...
for
stress
Stress may refer to:
Science and medicine
* Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition
* Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
marking. It is a vertical bar placed under the affected
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
.
Usage
Meteg is primarily used in
Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew (, or , ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of ...
to mark
secondary stress
Secondary stress (or obsolete: secondary accent) is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word, the stronger degree of stress being called ''primary''. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a ...
and
vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, f ...
.
Meteg is also sometimes used in Biblical Hebrew to mark a
long vowel
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, f ...
. While short and long vowels are largely allophonic, they are not always predictable from spelling, e.g. 'and they saw' vs. 'and they feared'. Meteg's indication of length also indirectly indicates that a following
shva
Shva or, in Biblical Hebrew, shĕwa ( he, שְׁוָא) is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign written as two vertical dots () beneath a letter. It indicates either the phoneme (shva na', mobile shva) or the complete absence of a vowel (/ Ø/) (shva na ...
is vocal, as in the previous case. This may distinguish qamatz gadol and qatan, e.g. 'she guarded' vs. 'guard (volitive)'.
In modern usage meteg is only used in liturgical contexts and dictionaries.
Siddur
A siddur ( he, סִדּוּר ; plural siddurim ) is a Jewish prayer book containing a set order of daily prayers. The word comes from the Hebrew root , meaning 'order.'
Other terms for prayer books are ''tefillot'' () among Sephardi Jews, ' ...
im and dictionaries may use meteg to mark
primary stress
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...
, often only for non-final 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
In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud ( or ) 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 ...
(diacritics for vowels or cantillation) under a consonant.
It is identical in appearance to
silluq and is unified with it in Unicode.
[Rhythmic and Structural Aspects of the Masoretic Cantillation of the Pentateuch](_blank)
/ref>
Meteg differs from other Hebrew diacritics in that its placement is not totally fixed.
/ref> 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
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and Leningrad
Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...
codices are not consistent in meteg placement.
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.
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
The Leningrad Codex ( la, Codex Leningradensis [Leningrad Book]; he, כתב יד לנינגרד) is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, using the Masoretic Text and Tiberian vocalization. According to its colopho ...
'' (around year 1006) whose text on paper was extremely compacted with minimal spacing between letters.
Unicode
In Unicode, Meteg and Silluq (when it occurs before punctuation Sof passuk
The ''sof passuk'' (Hebrew: , ''end of verse'', also spelled sof pasuq and other variant English spellings, and sometimes called סילוק silluq) is the cantillation mark that occurs on the last word of every verse, or '' passuk'', in the Tanak ...
at end of verses) are unified.
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
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 s ...
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
The combining grapheme joiner (CGJ), 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 s ...
(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
The dagesh () is a diacritic used in the Hebrew alphabet. It was added to the Hebrew orthography at the same time as the Masoretic system of niqqud (vowel points). It takes the form of a dot placed inside a Hebrew letter and has the effect of mod ...
(or Mapiq) consonant modifier, but this generally causes no problem.Derived combining classes
in the Unicode character database.
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
The zero-width joiner (ZWJ, ) 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 (complex scripts), such as the Arabic s ...
control (ZWJ, U+200D) for the medial position (between the two parts of the hataf vowel), or by a zero-width non-joiner
The zero-width non-joiner (ZWNJ) 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 ...
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
The Unicode collation algorithm (UCA) is an algorithm defined in Unicode Technical Report #10, which is a customizable method to produce binary keys from strings representing text in any writing system and language that can be represented with Unic ...
(UCA) with the appropriate tailoring for the Hebrew script, where these controls are assigned ignorable weights after the initial normalization.
References
External links
Normalization for Biblical Hebrew
{{Hebrew language
Hebrew alphabet
Punctuation