The Masoretic Cantillation Accents: A Prosodic Orthography for the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible contains two systems of notation for preserving and transmitting the most meaningful phonetic details of the oral performance of the text—a vocalic system and an accentual system. These systems were devised by medieval scribal scholars known as Masoretes, and together they constitute the full vocalization of the biblical text. The accentual system, the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ, is best known for the melodies that are used for cantillating (i.e. chanting) the text in liturgical settings. While the notations that represent the vowels are well understood, many of the complex facets of the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ have remained obscure. Pitcher (2020) argues that the main hindrance to fully understanding this system is the philological algorithm traditionally used to describe it: the Law of Continuous Dichotomy (LCD). Formalized by Wickes in 1887, the LCD does not treat the most salient feature of this complex system—intonation—in any significant way, and reduces the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ to a hierarchy of relative pause. Contrary to the LCD, Pitcher (2020) identifies the features, structures, and functions of the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ as constituting a prosodic system. Accordingly, this paper presents a cross-linguistic prosodic analysis of the Masoretic cantillation accents and introduces the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ as a prosodic orthography for the Hebrew Bible.