The leiner this morning paused right when he got up to the big כאלה and when one guy inevitably said it out loud, he paused and stared at him. I don't think that guy will do that again this week.
@TheOne קא isn't "just a filler word." It changes the tense of the verb
That pasuk is not used in my experience as an example of trop.
However, in the book An'im Zemorot by Elli Schorr he gives a list of the different Ta'amim using common examples of their occurrence. I know that when I first read this I recognized which psukim 90% of the examples were from just bas...
When I read the title I thought you were referring to how the baal keriyah should handle himself when reading Ka'eileh on chol hamoed pesach! — Double AA ♦Feb 20 '12 at 4:23
FWIW the answer to my above comment is: pause, let them get it out of their systems, and then read "Ka'eilah". — Double AA ♦Mar 30 at 21:16
@IsaacMoses I'm not familiar with this tradition. The leiner is supposed to pause at that word? What does it signify? (Do we have a question about this that I should go read?)
@MonicaCellio It's just a memorable word/note, so it's a really popular time for people to feel an urge to sing along. Pausing is a way for the reader to say "gotcha" that you should be listening to me read from the actual scroll and not singing along.
@DoubleAA oh, I hadn't looked at the trope -- is it special? (Hmm, Mechon Mamre doesn't show trope; where can I see that online other than ORT where you have to page through a few verses at a time?)
@DoubleAA oh, ok. I was thinking: it's not a shalshelet because there are only four of those and this isn't one of them; it's not that singleton one either; so what else stands out? I was wondering if there were an unusual sequence or something. But ok, it's just one that's caught people's attention for some reason; not everything needs to make sense. :-)
@Daniel Does it? Jastrow says it's "a particle of emphasis, mostly untranslatable" and proceeds to quote three uses where AFAICT ka means nothing at all.
I've never understood what ka does.
Alex says it indicates the present tense. What tense, then, is the same word without the ka?
@MonicaCellio People hear an emphatic word every day for 8 days in a row and they for some reason feel an urge to sing along. It's like the certain parts in the shabbos mincha and yom tov nusachot when everyone feels some weird urge to sing along with the sha"tz rather than listen to him
@msh210 My understanding is that it shifts the word into progressive tense
so קא אמרינן means "we are saying" rather than "we say"
perhaps a better example is קא מפליגי: they are arguing, not they argue
Some people, although listening to another's kidush (Friday night), sing part of it along with him: specifically (in my experience), the lines starting "ki vanu vacharta" when recited with this tune. This seems to me arguably not to be a problem (see e.g. Mishna B'rura 690 s'if katan 13–14; but s...
@msh210 Most particles are "untranslatable", yet definitely have meaning. It's not just the present continuous, although that seems to be a good shorthand. Most dictionaries have it as "particle used for emphasis". The best dictionary treatment I've seen is in Sokoloff's A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.
