Zarka or zarqa (, with variant English spellings) is a cantillation mark found in the

Torah The Torah ( , "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah is also known as the Pentateuch () ...

Haftarah The ''haftara'' or (in Ashkenazi Jews, Ashkenazic pronunciation) ''haftorah'' (alt. ''haftarah, haphtara'', ) "parting," "taking leave" (plural form: ''haftarot'' or ''haftoros''), is a series of selections from the books of ''Nevi'im'' ("Pr ...

, and other books of the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' Segol Segol (modern , ; formerly , ''səḡôl'') is a Hebrew niqqud vowel sign that is represented by three dots forming an upside down equilateral triangle "ֶ ". As such, it resembles an upside down therefore sign (a because sign) underneat ...

, with a

Munach The Munach (, also spelled ''Munah'' or ''Munakh''), translating to English as ''"to rest,"'' is a common Hebrew cantillation, cantillation sound. In Sephardi and Oriental traditions it is often called Shofar holekh. It is marked with a right angle ...

preceding either or both. The symbol for a Zarka is a 90 degrees rotated, inverted S. The Hebrew word translates as "throwing" and the melody is ascending in Moroccan and Sefardic tradition (with two or one retracements respectively) and descending in the Ashkenazic. Zarka is part of the Segol group. In this group, Zarka is the connector and Segol is the separator.Art of Torah Cantillation: A Step-by-step Guide to Chanting Torah By Marshall Portnoy, Josée Wolff, page 59

Zarka, Tsinnor and Tsinnorit

Zarka is also sometimes called tsinnor. Properly speaking, tsinnor is the name it receives when appears on the three ''poetic'' books (Job, Proverbs and Psalms, or the books, from their initials in Hebrew), and zarqa the name it gets on the remaining 21 books of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the ''prosaic'' books). Both sets of books use a different cantillation system. Caution must be taken not to confuse this mark with the very similar mark

tsinnorit Tsinnorit () is a cantillation mark in the Hebrew Bible, found at the 3 poetic books, also known as the Sifrei Emet books (Emet is an acronym of hebrew titles from three books, Job or in Hebrew, Proverbs or , and Psalms or ). It looks like a 9 ...

, which has the same shape but different position and use. They differ in the following: * Zarqa / tsinnor is always postpositive, which means that it is always placed after the consonant, that is, shows up to the left side: . Tsinnorit is always centered above it: . * Zarqa / tsinnor is a distinctive cantillation symbol both on the 21 books and the 3 books, while tsinnorit appears only on the 3 books, and always combined with a second mark ( merkha or mahapakh) to form a conjunctive symbol (called merkha metsunneret and mahpakh metsunnar, respectively). * Note that both marks have been wrongly named by

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. Zarqa / tsinnor corresponds to Unicode "Hebrew accent zinor", code point U+05AE (where "zinor" is a misspelled form for tsinnor), while tsinnorit maps to "Hebrew accent zarqa", code point U+0598.

Total occurrences

Melody

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zarka (Trope) Cantillation marks