Symbols and Syntax: Punctuation and Nikud in the Talmud

Punctuation vs. Nikud ; how common is ambiguity in how to punctuate the text of the Talmud, and how to deal with it? ; Trop (Hebrew cantillation) as an early traditional Hebrew form of punctuation

Announcement: conference that I’ll be attending today: “New Perspectives on the Talmud Yerushalmi : The 500th anniversary of the first printed edition of the Talmud Yerushalmi”. At the Cymbalista Jewish Heritage Center, Tel Aviv University. Thursday, June 8, 2023, from 9:15am to 7:45pm. You can join through Zoom, with the link available in the previously hyperlink.¹

Intro

In the comment section of my recent Seforim Blog post on digital editions of the Talmud Bavli, I got into an interesting discussion regarding Punctuation and Nikud in the Talmud. I’d like to reproduce the thrust of my comments here, with adjustments for clarity.

Punctuation vs. Nikud

Punctuation and nikud are often conflated, but they’re actually very different things:

Punctuation is periods, commas, quotation marks, etc. The current standard system of English punctuation can be traced back to the beginning of printing, in the early 16th century.^[1]

For an entertaining, accessible introduction to punctuation, check out Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks (2013) by Keith Houston. Chapter 1 is available from Amazon for free as a Kindle sample.

Nikud is how to verbalize words. Wikipedia defines (entry “Niqqud”):

“In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud (Hebrew: נִקּוּד‎, [...] "dotting, pointing" or Hebrew: נְקֻדּוֹת‎, [...] "dots") is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the Early Middle Ages.”

It’s quite clear that punctuation (not nikud) has a huge positive impact on comprehension in general.

Punctuation and Nikud in the Talmud

The main reason that punctuation hasn’t been incorporated into standard editions of the Talmud is for reasons of tradition.

Once one is past the beginner stage, nikud does little to enhance the reading experience, and in fact many readers find it a distraction. Modern Hebrew rarely uses nikud  for that reason, even for texts that have plenty invested in them. Exceptions are for literature geared towards children and beginners, as well as instances where decoding is especially difficult, such as poetry, transliterated foreign words, and ambiguous words (such as חלב, אבל, for rabbinic texts).

Wikipedia, in the entry on nikud cited above, points this out as well: “In modern Israeli orthography niqqud is seldom used, except in specialised texts such as dictionaries, poetry, or texts for children or for new immigrants to Israel.”

In contrast, punctuation is a huge boost to faster comprehension. Modern Hebrew texts use standard punctuation, like all modern languages.

It would be difficult to argue that lack of punctuation in the Talmud is any kind of advantage, narrowly speaking. Of course, speaking more broadly, communities that are more conservative will be much more invested in their studies, and so will be able to overcome lack of punctuation and other such difficulties in the traditional typography of the Talmud.

In general, as I point out in the piece, even the Orthodox world has accepted more user-friendly texts, more and more over the past few decades: Steinzaltz, Schottenstein, Oz VeHadar, Mesivta, and more. However, these are often only “allowed” as part of a commentary, and are looked down upon to an extent.

How common is ambiguity in how to punctuate the text of the Talmud, and how to deal with it?

it’s extremely rare for matters related to how to punctuate the text to be the subject of the disagreement. See the June 6 discussion in the Facebook group “Ask the Beit Midrash” (closed group, requires acceptance), where R’ Josh Waxman agrees that it is extremely rare.

Rashi will often verbally “punctuate” the by glossing the text using words such as  בתמיה or בניחותא  Rashi is providing a helping hand. This doesn’t mean that one could have reasonably explained the Talmudic text differently.

I think all this is quite clear if you think about a regular English book, which invariably has standard punctuation. If it didn’t have punctuation, you would still parse the text correctly in 99%+ cases. But it would be a lot more of a mental effort, for no reason.

In all this, I’m only discussing the Talmud Bavli. As for the Talmud Yerushalmi, there is indeed much more ambiguity regarding correct punctuation. TheTalmud  Yerushalmi is written in a more terse and laconic way than the Bavli. In addition, there are far more problematic textual issues.

Naturally, in a text that was originally unpunctuated, there will be some cases where correct punctuation is unclear, and can lead to dispute among commentators. But in those cases, the punctuation should follow Rashi’s interpretation. In the same way that the text of the Talmud will follow Rashi’s girsa, where relevant.

Trop (Hebrew cantillation) as an early traditional Hebrew form of punctuation

As an aside, I’d like to point out that trop (Hebrew cantillation) is an early medieval Hebrew form of punctuating the Biblical text. A few alternatives of punctuating the Torah arose in Geonic times.

Wikipedia, entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_cantillation:

Hebrew cantillation, trope, trop, or te'amim is the manner of chanting ritual readings from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. The chants are written and notated in accordance with the special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic Text of the Bible, to complement the letters and vowel points.

These marks are known in English as 'accents' (diacritics), 'notes' or trope symbols, and in Hebrew as taʿamei ha-mikra (טעמי המקרא) or just teʿamim (טעמים). Some of these signs were also sometimes used in medieval manuscripts of the Mishnah […]

The cantillation signs also provide information on the syntactical structure of the text […] The tropes are not random strings but follow a set and describable grammar […]

Some manuscripts of early Rabbinic literature contain marks for partial or systematic cantillation. This is true of the Sifra, and especially of Genizah fragments of the Mishnah.

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^[1] Punctuation - Wikipedia > “Printing-press era”

1. I’d like to thank Menachem Katz for informing me of this conference.