Teach me good judgment and knowledge: for I have believed thy commandments.
Psalms 119:66
Any interpretation that gainsays the accents must be neither besought nor heeded.
Abraham ibn Ezra (1140 CE)
Teach me good judgment and knowledge: for I have believed thy commandments.Psalms 119:66 |
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Any interpretation that gainsays the accents must be neither besought nor heeded.Abraham ibn Ezra (1140 CE) |
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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 process cantillation data from the Leningrad 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 and output of Cantillizer.
History & Theory |
Implementation |
Output |
Signs & Abbreviations |
Cantillation Keyboard |
Cantillation marks belong to a complex system of punctuation or textual annotation (the dots, lines, and curves written above, below, within, and between Hebrew letters) that convey an enormous amount of information with breathtaking economy of means, as pertains to the following:
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• Homographs & phonetic shifts • Vowels • Syntactic relationships • Metrical units • Tonic accent, intonation & pauses • Melody, modulation & rhythm |
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1. 2. Diacritic, shin dot, distinguished from sin dot, written
500-1000 CE. 3. Diacritic, dagesh, distinguished from the rare rafe & null grapheme, or mappik, conveying diverse phonetic & etymological information. 4. Vowel,
generally in sublinear positive position. 5. Cantillation, generally on tonic syllable, sublinear & superlinear, prepositive, positive & postpositive. 6. Punctuation, interliteral, makef (word joiner), pasek (emphatic word separator), sof pasuk (verse separator). |
Color Key: |
fig תאנה cantillation marks |
sapphire ספיר vowels |
olive זית dagesh (diacritical marks) |
saffron כרכם background |
pomegranate רמון punctuation marks |
rose חבצלת shin/sin dot (diacritical marks) |
Color Key: |
Emperor
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King
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Duke |
Earl |
Footman |
, generally a consonant, sometimes a vowel,
semi-vowel, or