Monday, 30 June 2025

Accents under the text repeated in a single word

Yesterday's post proved prophetic. After completing over 80% of the Bible and manipulating and deleting about 50,000 images -- that's a guess but probably not far off the mark -- I had to correct some bits and pieces in the psalms. It's not very easy. LTR processing is minimally supported in Musescore as in a lot of other word processors. And correcting the te'amim is not well supported with the keyboard or onscreen keyboards I have.

Anyway - it's possible and only confusing because I had several books and directories and pages and other apps open on my desktop at once. A test of my nearly 80 year old short term memory.

I found in Judges two verses that had doubled silluq under the same word. This produces a spondee affect if you pay attention to the stress. 

There is a short word (from the stem lqk) in verses 17:2 and 19:1 in Judges with two consecutive silluq accents on each of its two syllables. There are 611 instances of two silluqs on one word remaining in my database of the Leningrad codex. Sometimes these are legitimate at the end of a verse for cadential emphasis. There are 18 instances of this particular diacritic combination on the stem lqk, e.g. לֻֽקַּֽח, to take, in the Scriptures. Most of them are in books I haven't yet done -- Samuel and Chronicles among them. The musician can make something of this apparent brief spondaic pulse.

17:2 of Judges. It is rare for the same accent under the text to be repeated on the same word.
But it does happen.

In the Psalms, doubling of an accent under the text occurs twice with a repeated munah, the fifth note of the scale, B, in Psalms 18:16, and 104:7. In each case the extra stress is on the last syllable of the word. Only one other accent below the text, the silluq, e, the tonic, is repeated on the same word. This occurs about 600 times in the Bible of which 93 are in the psalms. If you ever study the psalms -- and who would study them without the music  -- watch for them and imagine the emphatic pulse. 

Psalms 18:46 - three accents under one word!

In Psalms 18:46, I found three accents under a single word. One of these was a third silluq in the Leningrad codex. I corrected the middle one based on the earlier Aleppo codex to a d'khi, g, the third note of the scale. This changes the character of the final cadence.

Of course -- and I didn't put this in my instructions yesterday -- the addition of two bars changes the bar numbering for the rest of the psalm. So it's more than one image that has to be regenerated. I proved the correction process. It is independent of the database. So my database does not have to live past my best by date.

As to the other accents under the text, they are never doubled in a single word. One needs the database for a claim like this -- it requires a query or a filter like this: 

length(heb_word)-length(replace(heb_word,'1469')) >=8 and book_cd='PSALMS'

The answer is zero for all accents under the text except silluq and munah.



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