The Cantillation marks reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Cantillation marks

The Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible contains small dots or squiggles around the letters called cantillation marks (Teamim in Hebrew). The cantillation marks look similar to Hebrew vowels, but have different shapes or placements.

The primary purpose of the cantillation marks is to guide the chanting of the sacred texts during public worship. Very roughly speaking, each word of text has a cantillation mark at its primary accent and associated with that mark is a musical phrase that tells how to sing that word. The reality is more complex, with some words having two or no marks and the musical meaning of some marks dependent upon context. There are different sets of musical phrases, called trope, associated with different sections of the Bible. Trope varies with different Jewish traditions and individual cantorial styles.

The cantillation marks also provide information on the syntactical structure of the text and some say they are a commentary on the text itself, highlighting important ideas musically.

The cantillation marks are included in Unicode as characters 0591 through 05AF.

• Texts of Torah and Prophets with cantillation marks and accompaning RealAudio files, so you can hear how they are chanted by one Cantor.

This is the "Cantillation marks" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.