The Ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ: A Medieval ToBI Transcription of Tiberian Hebrew

Likely derived from an ancient system of chironomy, the graphemes of the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ were devised by Tiberian Masoretes in order to preserve key prosodic features of the oral performance of the Hebrew Bible more than 1000 years before the development of modern prosodic transcriptions. In this paper, the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ are introduced as a prosodic orthography of liturgical Tiberian Hebrew, representing a variety of post-lexical tones and embedded levels of prosodic segmentation. Specifically, conjunctive and disjunctive graphemes are iconic representations of pitch accents and boundary tones at three levels of contrastive pitch—low, high, and extra high—embedded within two domains of prosodic phrase structure. In other words, these graphemes represent pitch fluctuations in the flow of speech that are associated with the locus of lexical stress, with disjunctive accents additionally indicating the locus of two types of cross-linguistically distinct phrasal boundaries—namely, the intermediate phrase (φ) embedded in the intonational phrase (ι). Described in this way, the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ can be understood as a medieval analog to a modern system of transcribing the prosodic components of speech known as the Tones and Break Indices (ToBI).