Meteg
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Meteg (or metheg, Hebrew מֶתֶג, lit. 'bridle', also ga'ya געיה, lit. 'bellowing', מאריך ma'arikh, or מעמיד ma'amid) is a punctuation mark used in Biblical Hebrew for stress marking. It is a vertical bar placed under the affected syllable.
Meteg is primarily used in Biblical Hebrew to mark secondary stress and vowel length. Words may contain multiple metegs, e.g. מֹשְׁבֹתֵיכֶם, וּלְאֶבְיֹנְךָ.
Meteg is also sometimes used in Biblical Hebrew to mark a long vowel. While short and long vowels are largely allophonic, they are not always predictable from spelling, e.g. ויראו 'and they saw' vs. ויראו 'and they feared'. Meteg's indication of length also indirectly indicates that a following shva is vocal, as in the previous case. Note that this may distinguish qamatz gadol and qatan, e.g. שמרה 'she guarded' vs. שמרה 'guard (volitive)'.
Meteg is not used at all in Modern Hebrew. In modern usage meteg is only used in liturgical contexts. Siddurim may use meteg to mark primary stress. Some only use meteg to mark penultimate stress, since the majority of Hebrew words have final stress.
Its form is a vertical bar placed either to the left, the right, or in the middle of the niqqud (diacritics for vowels or cantillation) under a consonant. It is identical in appearance to silluq and is unified with it in Unicode.
Meteg differs from other Hebrew diacritics in that its placement is not totally fixed. While meteg is usually placed to the left of a vowel, some texts place it to the right, and some place it in the middle of hataf vowels. The Rabbinic Bible of 1524–25 always shifts meteg to the left, while the Aleppo and Leningrad codices are not consistent in meteg placement.
The different placements of meteg are subgrouped relatively to its order with surrounding vowel points occurring below letters before or after it and are summarized in the table below. Three types of metegs are generally considered, with the left meteg being the most common case for simple vowels (however there's some rare cases where this group must be subdivided according to the placement of cantillation accents), and the medial meteg occurring only (but most frequently) with (composite) hataf vowels.
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