Hebrew Cantillation Marks And Their Encoding

Purpose Of Cantillation Marks

Cantillation marks (also known as "taamey ha-miqra") are diacritic symbols annotating the Hebrew Bible text for the purpose of cantillation. They can serve three different purposes:

They give instructions for cantillation, which is their primary purpose at least today, and some of their features are plausible only in this context. They depict which parts of a sentence belong logically together for easier reading. They depict the syntactic structure of the underlying text.

As nearly all of them are placed on or below the consonant of the stressed syllable, they indicate word stress.

The tune to use for cantillation and the distribution of pauses depend on the syntactic structure of the text. It is therefore not surprising that the cantillation marks give information on the syntactic structure. The way this happens has some resemblance with the usage of punctuation marks in English. There, after each word, we have a punctuation mark telling what syntactic entity is terminated with this word: a full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark terminates a sentence; a colon terminates a partial sentence; semicolons, dashes, and commas terminate smaller units; a blank terminates a word; a hyphen terminates a part of a compound word. This is also how the cantillation marks work: they, like English punctuation marks, indicate that the word where they are placed terminates a smaller or larger syntactic unit. The equivalent of the full stop is the Sof Pasuq, the end of the Bible verse, which was also the basis of verse numbering.

Each cantillation mark belongs to a class indicating its dividing power. The word where it is placed terminates the syntactic entity consisting of this word and all preceding words where the dividing power of the respective mark is smaller. Of two marks with equal power with no intervening stronger mark, the earlier one is considered stronger.

The cantillation marks in the class with the least dividing power, that is, those that will always terminate syntactic units consisting of only one word, do in fact indicate that the word where they are placed is closer connected to the following word than to the preceding one. It is therefore reasonable to describe their rule as conjunctive. The other marks are called distinctive.

The Hierarchy of Distinctive Marks

As described above, the cantillation marks belong to different classes describing their dividing power. These classes carry the titles of rulers: a qeysar (Caesar, emperor) terminates an entire Bible verse and "reigns" it; a melekh (king) divides the realm of an emperor and reigns the first half which it terminates while the other half is still under the reign of the emperor. Likewise, analogous rules apply to the lower ranks of rulers: a mishne (duke) divides the realm of a king and reigns the first half which it terminates; a shalish (officer) divides the realm of a duke and reigns the first half which it terminates. Lowest in rank is a mesharet (servant), that is, a conjunctive mark. Only the term for a distinctive mark in general, mafsiq (divider), does not fit into this imagery of rulers.

Class	Cantillation Marks
Qeysar	Sof-Pasuk, Atnakh
Melekh	Segolta, Shalshelet, Zakef-Katon, Zakef-Gadol, Tarkha
Mishne	Revia, Zarqa, Pashta, Yetiv, Tevir
Shalish	Pazer-Gadol, Talsha, Geresh, Sheney-Gereshin, Paseq, Tarsa, Karney-Para

Note that, all videos presented on the site, a group of words marked in blue at any given moment, brings together sections of verse between two stop marks (mafsiqim).