Meteg
Meteg is a punctuation mark used in Biblical Hebrew for stress marking. It is a vertical bar placed under the affected syllable.
Usage
Meteg is primarily used in Biblical Hebrew to mark secondary stress and vowel length. Words may contain multiple metegs, e.g.,.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 '.
In modern usage meteg is only used in liturgical contexts and dictionaries. Siddurim and dictionaries may use meteg to mark primary stress, often only for non-final stress, since the majority of Hebrew words have final stress.
Appearance and placement
Its form is a vertical bar placed either to the left, the right, or in the middle of the niqqud 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, and the medial meteg occurring only with hataf vowels.
| Group | Position | Frequency | Example | Reference | Preferred encoding in logical order |
| Left meteg | centered alone below | common | לֵאמֹֽר׃ | Exodus | optional vowel points,, meteg point |
| Left meteg | after vowel point below | common | וַֽיִּמְצְא֗וּ | 1 Kings | optional vowel points,, meteg point |
| Left meteg | between vowel points below | common | יְרוּשָׁלִָ͏ֽם׃ | 2 Chronicles | first vowel point,, meteg point, second vowel point |
| Left meteg | before cantillation accent | rare | לֹֽ֣א | Exodus | meteg point,, cantillation accent |
| Left meteg | after hataf vowel point | rare | הֱֽיֹות־אֶֽהְיֶ֥ה | Psalms | hataf vowel point, ZWNJ, meteg point |
| Left meteg | after vowel point and cantillation accent below | occasional | נְ͏ֽ֭נַתְּקָה | Psalms | optional vowel point, cantillation accent, CGJ, meteg point |
| Left meteg | after cantillation accent | rare | עֲבָדִ͏ֽ֑ים׃ | Exodus | optional vowel point, cantillation accent, CGJ, meteg point |
| Right meteg | before vowel point, first syllable | common | תֽ͏ַעֲשֶׂ֨ה־לְךָ֥֣ | Exodus | meteg point, CGJ, vowel point |
| Right meteg | before vowel point, word-medial | rare | וְלֽ͏ַנַּעֲרָ֙ | Deuteronomy | meteg point, CGJ, vowel point |
| Right meteg | before hataf vowel point | rare | הֽ͏ֲלֹא־אַ֭תָּה | Psalms | meteg point, CGJ, vowel point |
| Medial meteg | medial, inside hataf segol vowel point | common | אֱֽלֹהֵיכֶ֔ם | 2 Chronicles | hataf vowel point, ZWJ, meteg point |
| Medial meteg | medial, inside hataf patah vowel point | common | אֲֽשֶׁר־לַדְּבִ֖יר | 1 Kings | hataf vowel point, ZWJ, meteg point |
Note finally that under narrow letters with vowel points below, or under letters that are also surrounded by multiple vowel points or cantillation accents below them, the meteg may not fit well on any side of the vowel point below the base letter. In that case the meteg may adopt an ambiguous position, below the existing vowel point or above the cantillation accent that normally fits below the base letter. Such ambiguous positioning occurs in old books like the Codex Leningradensis whose text on paper was extremely compacted with minimal spacing between letters.
Unicode
In Unicode, Meteg and Silluq are unified.| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
| he | U+05BD | Hebrew Point Meteg |
Unicode also does not distinguish between the different placements of Meteg. And because Meteg has a distinctive combining class, its encoding order relative to other diacritics is not significant. Consequently, the Meteg may be freely reordered during Unicode normalization when it appears in sequences with other combining diacritics, without affecting its interpretation or rendering.
Where the relative placement of Meteg is significant and does not match the standard order of combining classes of Hebrew diacritics, a combining grapheme joiner should be added between Meteg and other diacritics before or after it, to fix its rendering placement and intended meaning.
In the most frequent use of Meteg, it should follow the vowel mark, but the canonical ordering of combining classes swaps them during standard normalizations: the canonical combining class of Meteg is 22, higher than the canonical combining classes 10 to 20 assigned to Hebrew vowel points; it is also higher than the canonical combining class 21 assigned to the combining Dagesh consonant modifier, but this generally causes no problem.
In the most frequent cases of use in modern Hebrew, the Meteg should only follow a vowel point and cantillation marks are not used; but in Biblical Hebrew it must sometimes be encoded with an additional CGJ after it before a vowel point, so that it remains interpreted first before the niqqud after it ; Meteg must also be preceded by a CGJ if it must appear after a cantillation accent.
Additionally, the special placements of meteg with the three hataf vowels requires encoding it after the hataf vowel point, separated by a zero-width joiner control for the medial position, or by a zero-width non-joiner control for the final position ; some encoded texts use CGJ instead of ZWNJ for the later case.
The three controls CGJ, ZWJ and ZWNJ are all blocking the canonical reordering of meteg with vowels points, and only ZWJ is needed for the special placement of meteg in the middle of an hataf vowel. But in the cases where the encoding of CGJ is optional but not needed, or for the case where ZWNJ is replaced by CGJ, the presence or absence of this CGJ control creates texts that are not visually distinctive, but they are still not canonically equivalent. This may create difficulties for plain-text search, unless it uses a conforming Unicode collation algorithm with the appropriate tailoring for the Hebrew script, where these controls are assigned ignorable weights after the initial normalization.