You’re Talking to Gd Wrong

It happens to me every year. Every holiday. Every day, in fact.

I come across this one word, and my soul cringes inside my body knowing that millions of Jews have absolutely no clue that they’re saying it wrong. I didn’t know that I’d been saying it wrong for years myself until I stumbled across a random shul newsletter a few years back.

And, seeing as how this word is one of Gd’s names, saying it wrong is kind of a big deal.

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4 thoughts on “You’re Talking to Gd Wrong”

  1. In the photo accompanying the article, the excerpt looks like Psalm 18. Here the accent seems to be on the first syllable, different from the standard pronunciation mentioned in the editor’s comment at the end of the article.

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    1. Good eye! It is indeed Psalm 18. Concerning syllable stress, scriptural tropes work on a slightly different system than standard spoken or liturgical Hebrew (as you noted, the accent is under the first syllable, yet there are only two kinds of grammatical stresses: milra-last syllable & mileil-second to last syllable. In spoken/liturgical Hebrew, it is therefore impossible to have a word with more than two syllables with a stress on the first syllable. Also some words have double tropes at the beginning and end of a word). Additionally, some tropes are “locked” into positions and will always appear at that point, and some are conditionally locked dependent on what trope preceded it. It’s similar to the case of Abimelech’s general Pichol (Genesis 26) whose proper name is “Pichol” yet t is always sounded as “Fichol” because it follows a vav.

      At any rate, one of the tropes main function is to illustrate where the musical motif should go, not necessarily what the syllable stress is.

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