I have mentioned before the ambiguity of the short vertical stroke under a syllable called a metheg, or silluq, or ga'ya. Geoffrey Khan explains in his PDF on the Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew as follows:
The gaʿya does not have a definite status in the reading of Scripture. One reader may omit it and another reader may sustain it. There are some places, however, in which it may not be omitted, since it affects the meaning. This applies to the lexical class of ‘fearing’, and so they have said ‘Every (form from) the lexical class of ‘fearing’ has gaʿya’. ... If somebody were to say ‘So do you consider it to be one of the conjunctive accents or disjunctive accents?’, the response to him would be as follows. It should not be considered to belong either with the disjunctive accents or the conjunctive accents, since it is only an exhalation in speech, which carries the words forward, ...His examples include these which occur in the text from the Leningrad codex. כִּ֤י לֹ֣א יִֽ֭שְׁנוּ אִם־לֹ֣א יָרֵ֑עוּ Proverbs 4:16. The short vertical stroke, it appears, distinguishes the word form as part of the domain of sleeping (iwn), as opposed to the domain of repetition (wnh), such as in Nehemiah 13:21 אִם־תִּשְׁנ֕וּ יָ֖ד אֶשְׁלַ֣ח בָּכֶ֑ם.
Now that's interesting. That could resolve some ambiguity. Not easily, but possible within a program reading the text, as long as the root is made available to the program. (My music program could do this but it doesn't. It works entirely from the text itself. A human reader, however, would recognize the distinction.) So I ask, does twnu occur as a word form with wnh or does iwnu occur as an ambiguous form in the Hebrew text?
Well friend, it is rare! For sleep. ישׁן, iwnv occurs once as noted above. For the stem שׁנה iwnv occurs once in Job 29:22 אַחֲרֵ֣י דְ֭בָרִי לֹ֣א יִשְׁנ֑וּ וְ֝עָלֵ֗ימוֹ תִּטֹּ֥ף מִלָּתִֽי The word form twnv only occurs in Nehemiah as above. Nowhere else. So a single ga'ya is used to distinguish these? That seems overkill. But it works OK in the music here even if not necessary.
Now just to verify if the result is complete. It is correct as far as it goes. But there are an additional 4 word forms of the form iwnv for the stem iw, a grammatical participle. Esther 3:8, Deuteronomy 29:14, and 1 Samuel 14:39 and 23:23. I suspect there is no marking on any of these. All four of them look like this יֶשְׁנ֣וֹ. No short vertical stroke, whatever you call it.
Now - just how many of these strokes are there in the Bible? They occur in 23,184 verses out of 23,197. And in many verses they occur repeatedly. Altogether the stroke occurs 41,307 times in the 300,000 odd words in the Hebrew canon. At least 1 of these is a ga'ya! A few are methegs in the Lambdian sense, but 99.99% of them are silluq.
Why didn't the late Prof Lambdin mention this in his grammar? (He specifically excluded accents. I don't recommend this, but it is how I began. I think we should all learn to sing the Hebrew if we want to learn Hebrew. R. Yohanen in b. Megilla 32a implies that no one should read the Bible without a melody. I would learn the Haïk-Vantoura key even if it is wrong because I love clarity over confusion, and her deciphering key is so clear, you can sight-read from it.)
I just did a search and found a book called the Masora on Scripture and its Methods. Obviously by people with a lot more knowledge than I have, but do I believe them? They have a light ga'ya and a heavy ga'ya. The latter sounds suspiciously like a metheg. It is almost word for word with Lambdin, page xxvii paragram 11, a paragraph that I could not bear to memorize or understand. I can't believe how hard teachers insist on making this language.
Their light ga'ya "is a stress that comes on an open syllable, separated from the primary stressed syllable, by a sounded schwa at least". This book actually answers the question of whether there are more or fewer ga'yaot in modern editions compared to the manuscripts (Leningrad and Aleppo). If Haïk-Vantoura is correct in her work using the silluq, then it is good that the codices do not contain these pronunciation marks that cannot be distinguished from each other. The music is corrupted by modern versions (Letteris, Ginsburg, and Koren), where the heavy and light ga'yaot are made explicit, but the music is better preserved in the WLC and Aleppo mss. Aren't we lucky!
I absolutely love the dedication of the tradition and the copyists. But the emphasis on speaking and writing the words without knowledge of the music has resulted in much confusion. Multiple names for the same thing, and multiple functions for the same sign. Who knows what to do in the field when the signal corps gives ambiguous signals? (This lack of music is not confined to Judaism by any means. Many preachers and scholars of all traditions are untrained in music.)
Will the Crown Bible, the edition that is meant to return to the Aleppo tradition, result in fewer than 41,307 short vertical strokes under open or closed syllables?
I guess we will have to wait and see. And we would need the data in a database to count. I can't count that high one by one.
One example of the difference between Leningrad and Aleppo arises from verses where there is no final silluq. There are 35 of these. Several end in ornaments, particularly in the chapter containing the 10 words. A few simply end the music in mid air. I have not looked at them as a musician yet. (Note that the verse marker, the sof pasuk, is not used in the Aleppo codex. This marker, pace Burns, has nothing to do with the music.)
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| Psalms 89:41 |
Psalms 89:41 has this musical phrase: e f# ^A g B. It does not end on the tonic, perhaps because the verse speaks of disarray. So the manuscript shows a wiggly line that could be a silluq, but it is disarrayed. An uncertain jot.
You have breached all his fences.
You have set up his enclosures in disarray.
The full set of 35 verses that end without the silluq, that defined short vertical stroke, are these:
Genesis 32:24, Exodus 20 (several end with ornaments), Leviticus 26:28, Numbers 25:19, Numbers 27:9
Deuteronomy 5:7 (several end with ornaments), Judges 13:18, Isaiah 13:7, Isaiah 13:16, Hosea 11:7
Psalms 31:20, Psalms 32:2, Psalms 37:31, Psalms 37:32, Psalms 59:5, Psalms 60:13
Psalms 71:4, Psalms 74:17, Psalms 78:41, Psalms 89:7, Psalms 89:41 (above), Proverbs 8:28, Proverbs 24:15
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