Visualizing the System of Hebrew Accents

The Hebrew alphabet, like the Arabic alphabet, does not have any dedicated letters for writing vowels – so for thousands of year the texts of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) was made up of almost entirely consonants. Because of the unique way words are formed in semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic, this is not a huge problem like most English speakers might assume. In most cases, a word’s context is enough for a Hebrew speaker to intuitively know how to pronounce the word – just like how English speakers intuitively know to pronounce “tear” differently in “I shed a tear” as opposed to “I tear some paper.”

But after the destruction of the second temple, fewer and fewer Jews spoke Hebrew as their native language – mostly interacting with the language through the oral tradition of public reading. For someone familiar with the Hebrew alphabet but not a speaker of Hebrew, the text would perhaps look something like the English translation below:

By the middle ages, a group of sages called the Masoretes began to add diacritics to their manuscripts in order to preserve the oral reading tradition within the text itself, before errors accumulated or it was forgotten all together. Most well known are the markings they added to represent vowels, called Nikud. With just Nikud, the intended pronunciation of the text can be determined just by looking at it:

But, the Masoretes added other markings, called Ta’amim, which indicated more than just pronunciation. After thousands of years of regular reading, Jews had developed a tradition of chanting the text in a way that mirrored its grammatical structure. The Ta’amim, called cantillation marks or accents in English, described how to chant the text, and thus, also described its grammatical structure. Like with punctuation marks in English, the intended structure of the text can now be understood just by looking at it:

Overview

I like to think about accents as grouping the words in a verse into phrases (each of which is a group of usually one or two words that are closely related) and in turn grouping these phrases into clauses (each of which is usually a sentence fragment with a subject and object) – the way accents define these divisions will be outlined later.

First, as an example, here is the verse from the introduction, Genesis 1:15, divided into phrases and clauses based on its accents – hover to see the correspondences between the Hebrew and the English (the colors are described in the next section):

As you may have noticed above, it is the accent on the last word of each clause that actually corresponds to an English punctuation mark. These accent marks are called remote disjunctive accents, and here is an overview of the four most common of them and their approximate relationship to English punctuation:

You may not be surprised to learn that the way a verse is divided into phrases and clauses may have an impact on its meaning! A classic example comes from the King James Version of Isaiah 40:3, which reads: “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” In particular, “in the wilderness” is grouped together with the phrase about a voice crying out. Most modern translations go with something like the following instead (where each clause is put on its own line for clarity):

“In the wilderness” has the accent Zakef-gadol, a special way of writing Zakef when it is the only word in its clause. Based on our assessment of Zakef above, this suggests that “in the wilderness” should at least be separated with a comma from what comes before it (just like the other two clauses with Zakef are). Even with a comma, this clause could still be in reference to the voice (perhaps it is just separated for poetic or rhetorical effect), but the strong parallelism of road and desert imagery of the final four phrases of this verse makes that seem unlikely to most modern translators. The indentation is added to make this parallelism easier to spot.

(Warning: The remainder of this article now switches tones from explanatory to technical, and assumes enough familiarity with Hebrew to easily pick out accents.)

The way a verse is divide into phrases and clauses is entirely determined by the type of an accent:

• Conjunctive accents indicate that the word they’re on is part of a phrase that includes the following word
• Near disjunctive accents indicate that the word they’re on is the end of a phrase and part of a clause that includes the following word
• Remote disjunctive accents indicate that the word they’re on is the end of a phrase and the end of a clause (these were highlighted above)

All of the possible accents, as well as their types, are explained in the next section.

Visualization of the System

This section provides a complete description of the system of accents used in all the books of the Tanakh except Psalms, Proverbs, and Job (see the last section). Although this way of describing the system in a table appears to be a new contribution (if you know of any source that has a similar table, please let me know!), the source used for all of the information in this section and the next is The Syntax of Masoretic Accents by James D. Price – except here Kadma V’Azla is treated as one accent instead of two.

The heart of this section is the first table below. In the language of the overview above:

• Each row represents a possible clause.
• To form a clause, start anywhere in a row, then read right-to-left until you reach the leftmost cell (the remote disjunctive accent that ends the clause).
• Each pair of accents with one parenthesized and the other not represents a possible phrase within that clause.

Complete rules for the first table below: To find out what accent(s) can come after a given accent, follow these rules for moving from cell-to-cell:

• Within a row, you can only move directly left, although you may optionally skip any conjunctive accents (those in parentheses).
• Once you reach the end of the row, you may then jump to any cell in that column or a column to the right.
• If an accent is by itself – meaning it has nothing from its row directly before it – then it may need to be substituted (see the second table below).
• An asterisk (*) means this accent can only be used once per verse, as the first of its rank or higher in the verse (these are Etnachta and Segol).
• A dagger mark (†) means that this accent, L’garmeh, can be jumped to from Kadma V’Azla. In other words, Kadma V’Azla can act like a remote disjunctive accent (i.e. one at the end of a row) before L’garmeh. This is represented visually by a dashed line separating the two.
• A double dagger mark (‡) means that on rare occasions, for musical reasons, accents in this column that usually cannot be repeated may be repeated before advancing.

Colors: When hovering over the tables below:

• Light red indicate all accents which could have come before the current accent (without jumping),
• Orange indicates the current accent or one its substitutes,
• Yellow indicates all accents which can come immediately after the current accent, and
• Light green indicates all accents which could come further after the current accent (without jumping).

Note about multiple conjunctive accents in a row: This can happen because of the substitutions above (Kadma and Mercha-k’fulah) that turn a disjunctive accent into a conjunctive one. But, it can also happen because Munach is allowed to occur multiple times (potentially many times) in a row. Note that before a R’via, the penultimate such Munach is always instead a Darga.

Note about accent placement: Most accents are placed on the accented syllable of the word, but some are always placed on the left-most letter of the word, specifically Pashta, Zarka, Segol, and T’lisha. Only two rare accents are always placed on the right-most letter of the word, specifically Y’tiv and T’lisha-g’dolah. For these latter two categories, modern texts will often duplicate the accent on, or add a related accent to, the stressed syllable – to help with proper pronunciation while chanting.

Example: The verse Genesis 24:47 is an excellent example of this system in action, containing only the most common accents, lots of jumps, and a few skipped conjunctive accents. Open this page in a separate window, put this verse and the table above side by side, and see if you can follow along!

Challenging example: The verse Numbers 35:5 provides a challenge: it contains five substitutions and an example of Kadma V’Azla acting like a remote disjunctive accent before L’garmeh. It is also an example of the English punctuation correspondences from the overview only partially working, a common occurrence in long verses or complicated verses like this one. For these reasons, it is also an important balance to the previous example, since the complexity of most verses lies somewhere between the two.

Accents in the Three Poetic Books

The poetic books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Job use a closely related, but fundamentally different system of accents. A different system is necessary because of the unique structure of Hebrew poetry. Most pressingly, verses of Hebrew poetry are often made up of three parallel verselets, necessitating the addition of a companion accent to Etnachta that can be used to divide a verse into three equal parts, instead of always two.

In general, the structure of this system is far less strict than the above, especially around the use of conjunctive accents. Thus, the table below is just meant to provide a sketch of how the system works and not be a complete description. Although the shape and structure of the table below is mostly very similar to the table in the previous section, almost all of the accents are either different, used in a different way, or given a different name. Keep in mind the following exceptions:

• Most disjunctive accents have multiple other conjunctive accents that can pair with it – for these accents, the pairing listed below is just the most common.
• All near disjunctive accents (those not at the end of their row) can be substituted for a conjunctive accent (in the same way Kadma V’Azla can be substituted for Kadma above). Additionally, most of them can be repeated before advancing to the left.
• An asterisk (*) means this accent can only be used once per verse. These are Ole-v’yored and Etnachta, and if both appear, they must be used in that order.
• A dagger (†) means this accent, Mahpach-l’garmeh, can be jumped to before any disjunctive accent. For example, it can be jumped to from Azla-l'garmeh before any duke, jumped to from R’via-mugrash before a Sof-pasuk, etc. Thus, its particular row and column in the table is somewhat arbitrary. Note that the colors on hovering are only somewhat accurate for this accent, since they do not take in to account the fact that after jumping to this accent, you must then jump back to where you came from.

Example: The triplet structure of Psalms 1:1 perfectly demonstrates the unique qualities of this system of accents: