Cantillation
Teamim, also called cantillation, (Hebrew טעמי המקרא ta'amei ha - mikra or short טעמים te'amim; Yiddish ( also common in English ) trope: articulations, accents) are characters in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible ( Tanakh ), in addition set the musical lecture in Jewish worship to consonant and vowel signs ( = Nikud ). Teamim and vowels were established in the early Middle Ages by the Masoretic scholars (see Hebrew alphabet).
Some of these characters were also used in medieval manuscripts of the Mishnah.
Almost all of the 48 Teamim are available in the stressed syllables and show that even the word accent on.
Teamim originally served as punctuation, and in this function also for understanding the texts of importance. By linking and separating meaning they indicate the logical ( syntactic ) relations in the sentence, like comma, semicolon and point. In some cases, this is done with a changed emphasis and pronunciation of this word standing hand in hand, which is also set down in writing, such as elongated vowels in highly divisive Teamim. These forms are called Pausalformen since the changes resulted from the discussion before you pause at about the end of a sentence.
The main Teamim to indicate the punctuation, the "emperor" ( " Sof pasuq " on Send, " Atnach " or " Etnachta " in the Versmitte ) and the "kings" (the first of them in the half-verse, mostly " Saqef QATON " denotes the center of the half- verse ). In the Psalms, Proverbs and the Book of Job (Job ) a slightly different scheme is used, in which the two half- verses are further divided differently from each other.