Hebrew cantillation

Hebrew cantillation, trope, trop, or te'amim is the manner of chanting ritual readings from the Hebrew Bible in Jewish prayer. 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 used in niqqud. These marks are known in English as 'accents' (diacritics), 'notes' or trope symbols, and in Hebrew as taʿamé ha-mikrá 'cantillation marks of the scriptures' (טַעֲמֵי־הַמִּקְרָא) or just teʿamím 'cantillation marks' (טְעָמִים). Some of these signs were also sometimes used in medieval manuscripts of the Mishnah. The musical motifs associated with the signs are known in Hebrew as niggun or neginot (not to be confused with the nigunim of Hasidic Judaism) and as Yiddish: טראָפּ, romanized: trop: the word trope is sometimes used in Jewish English varieties with the same meaning. There are multiple traditions of cantillation. Within each tradition, there are multiple tropes, typically associated with different books of the Bible and often with different occasions. For example, different chants may be used for Torah readings on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur than for the same text on a normal Shabbat.