♫ Cantillizer ש֕ - Cantillation

Distributional Analysis of Cantillation Marks

Author: Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss (sagreiss@sagreiss.org)

The thousand-year-old cantillation marks that punctuate the much older linguistic text of the Hebrew Bible are traditionally deemed to serve three overlapping purposes, musical, rhetorical (oratorical), and hermeneutic (exegetical). The goal of the Cantillizer software application project is to extract and process cantillation data from the Aleppo Codex for the purpose of studying the linear and the hierarchical order (or environment) in which the signs occur in order to derive the logical rules that govern them. The database will hold all cantillation information by book, chapter, and verse, allowing queries to provide display and statistical analysis that show the patterns or structure of the signs. Read a general and theoretical history of the interpretation of cantillation marks or skip to the technical specifications and blueprint for the implementation of Cantillizer. If you are a student or database programmer interested in helping to develop this research, please contact us.