Hebrew Point Meteg

It guides reading; it is not itself a vowel. Meteg is a combining mark, meaning it attaches to a Hebrew consonant alongside its vowel signs (niqqud). It can mark secondary stress, lengthen a vowel, or show that a following sheva—a small Hebrew vowel mark—is pronounced. The older name gaʿya is still used.

Meteg’s placement rules are documented at least a millennium ago. The Aleppo and Leningrad codices, handwritten Hebrew Bible manuscripts, preserve different placements. Scribes kept some forms and dropped others, and grammarians later organized the rules. In the first half of the thirteenth century, the Hebrew grammarian Jekuthiel ha-Nakdan systematized them and meteg became the familiar name.

Why does meteg move around a Hebrew vowel?

Its position can reflect a manuscript or edition convention. Meteg usually appears on the left of a vowel mark, though manuscripts and printed editions also place it on the right. With a hataf vowel—a reduced Hebrew vowel written as a two-part mark—meteg may sit between the parts. Placement alone is not known to change its function.

Text normalization, which standardizes equivalent character sequences, and font shaping can alter how marks appear. CGJ (combining grapheme joiner), an invisible Unicode marker, preserves right-of-vowel ordering; ZWJ and ZWNJ (zero-width joiner and non-joiner) can preserve medial or left placement with hataf vowels when the source layout matters.

Is meteg the same as silluq?

The name depends on where the stroke appears. Inside a word, meteg or gaʿya gives a secondary stress or pronunciation cue. On the stressed syllable of the last word in a biblical verse, the same stroke is silluq; it appears with sof pasuq, the verse-ending mark.