Meteg
| Meteg | ||
|---|---|---|
| מתג | ֽ | אֲהֵבֽוּךָ |
| compare with comma | ||
| ,אֲהֵבֽוּךָ | ||
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Meteg (or metheg, Hebrew מֶתֶג, lit. 'bridle', also gaya געיה, lit. 'bellowing', מאריך ma'arikh, or מעמיד ma'amid) is a punctuation mark used in Biblical Hebrew for stress marking. It is a vertical bar place under the affected syllable.
Usage
Meteg is primarily used in Biblical Hebrew to mark secondary stress and vowel length. Words may contain multiple metegs, e.g. מֹשְׁבֹתֵיכֶם, וּלְאֶבְיֹנְךָ.
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. 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. In modern usage meteg is only used in liturgical contexts. Siddurim 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.[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]
| 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.[4]
| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
|---|---|---|
| ֽ | U+05BD | HEBREW POINT METEG |
External links
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