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shibboleth

 
Dictionary: shib·bo·leth   (shĭb'ə-lĭth, -lĕth') pronunciation
n.
  1. A word or pronunciation that distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another.
    1. A word or phrase identified with a particular group or cause; a catchword.
    2. A commonplace saying or idea.
  2. A custom or practice that betrays one as an outsider.

[Ultimately from Hebrew šibbōlet, torrent of water, from the use of this word to distinguish one tribe from another that pronounced it (Judges 12:4-6).]


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Word Origins: shibboleth
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from Hebrew
This word originated in Israel

Language can be a matter of life and death. This certainly was so in the case of the ancient Ephraimites, one of the twelve tribes of Israel, whose linguistic misadventure the Bible relates in the book of Judges. They had stood by while Jephthah took command of another tribe, the Gileadites, and routed their oppressors, the Ammonites. You would think the Ephraimites would have appreciated Jephthah's destruction of their common enemy, but in fact they were furious at being left out. "Wherefore passedst thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee?" asked the Ephraimites in the accents of our King James version. "We will burn thine house upon thee with fire."

Jephthah, a mighty man of valor, didn't care for their attitude. He replied that he had called for them, but they hadn't come. With that, he gathered his Gileadites and smote the Ephraimites. After the battle, the surviving Ephraimites tried to sneak across the River Jordan: "And it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over, that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said Nay, then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth; for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand."

To those of us who speak English, the sh of shibboleth is easy enough to pronounce. But there are many dialects and languages that do not have that sound. A speaker of Hawaiian, for example, or of Quechua, a major language of South America, could not come close.

In Hebrew, shibboleth means stream of water. But because of this biblical use, shibboleth has a different meaning in English: an arbitrary test or custom that distinguishes one group from another, or a word or slogan identified with a particular group or party. It appears in English as early as John Wycliffe's 1382 translation of the Bible.

Hebrew, like its close relative Arabic, is a Semitic language in the Afro-Asiatic language family. Until the present century it had survived for two thousand years only as a liturgical language for students of the Bible and for Jewish religious services. But the Zionist movement revived it for everyday use, and it has been the official language of Israel since that country came into existence in 1948. There are now nearly three million speakers of Hebrew in Israel.

Biblical Hebrew has had a strong influence on English. Hebrew words in English include hallelujah (1382) and amen (950), as well as cherub (825), manna (897), behemoth (1382), cider (1300), messiah (1300), cabal (1614), schwa (1895), and from modern Hebrew, kibbutz (1944). Other Hebrew words like chutzpah (1892) and schmooze (1897) have immigrated through Yiddish to English.



 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Shibboleth
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Shibboleth (shĭb'ōlĕth), in the Bible, test word that the Gileadites made the Ephraimites pronounce. As Ephraimites could not say sh but only s as in "Sibboleth," this was regarded as a test of an Ephraimite; 42,000 Ephraimites were thus detected.


Bible Dictionary: shibboleth
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(shib-uh-luhth, shib-uh-leth)

In the Old Testament, shibboleth was a password used by the Israelites. It was chosen because their enemies could not pronounce it.

  • By extension, a shibboleth is an often-repeated slogan. It also means an arbitrary test to prove membership in a group.

  • Obscure Words: shibboleth
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    slogan, catchword; a custom or usage regarded as a criterion for distinguishing membership
    Wikipedia: Shibboleth
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    This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

    Shibboleth (pronounced /ˈʃɪbəlɛθ/[1] or /ˈʃɪbələθ/[2]) is any distinguishing practice which is indicative of one's social or regional origin. It usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group.

    Statue of Pier Gerlofs Donia, known for his legendary strength and size and the invention of a famous shibboleth

    Contents

    Origin

    The term originates from the Hebrew word "shibbólet" (שִׁבֹּלֶת), which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain[3] or, in different contexts, "stream, torrent".[4][5] It derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect lacked a /ʃ/ sound (as in shoe), from Gileadites whose dialect did include such a sound.

    In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead inflicted a military defeat upon the tribe of Ephraim (around 13701070 BC), the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the Jordan River back into their home territory and the Gileadites secured the river's fords to stop them. In order to identify and kill these refugees, the Gileadites put each refugee to a simple test:

    Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say Shibboleth.' If anyone said, 'Sibboleth', because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion.

    Judges 12:5-6, NJB

    Modern usage

    In numerous cases of conflict between groups speaking different languages or dialects, one side used shibboleths in a way similar to the above-mentioned Biblical use, i.e., to discover hiding members of the opposing group. Christians might have been familiar with the Biblical story and directly inspired by it, or might have independently invented the same method under similar circumstances. Modern researchers use the term "Shibboleth" for all such usages, whether or not the people involved were using it themselves.

    Today, in the English language, a shibboleth also has a wider meaning, referring to any "in-crowd" word or phrase that can be used to distinguish members of a group from outsiders - even when not used by a hostile other group. The word is also sometimes used in a broader sense to mean jargon, the proper use of which identifies speakers as members of a particular group or subculture.

    Shibboleths can also be customs or practices, such as male circumcision, or a signifier, such as a semiotic.

    Cultural touchstones and shared experience can also be shibboleths of a sort. For example, people about the same age who are from the same nation tend to have the same memories of popular songs, television shows, and events from their formative years. Much the same is true of alumni of a particular school, veterans of military service, and other groups. Discussing such memories is a common way of bonding. In-jokes can be a similar type of shared-experience shibboleth.

    Notable shibboleths

    A notable if indirect reference to shibboleth in modern poetry is "the synagogue of the ear of corn" in the Dylan Thomas poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London".

    Shibboleths have been used by different subcultures throughout the world at different times. Regional differences, level of expertise and computer coding techniques are several forms that shibboleths have taken. For example, during the Battle of the Bulge, American soldiers used knowledge of baseball to determine if others were fellow Americans or if they were German infiltrators in American uniform. The Dutch famously used the name of the port town Scheveningen as a shibboleth to tell Germans from the Dutch (the Dutch pronounce the S separately from the ch). Some shibboleths are jokes.

    During World War II, some United States soldiers in the Pacific theater used the word "lollapalooza" as a shibboleth to verbally test people who were hiding and unidentified, on the premise that Japanese people often pronounce the letter L as R, and that the word is an American colloquialism that even a foreign person fairly well-versed in American English would probably mispronounce and/or be unfamiliar with.[6] In George Stimpson's A Book about a Thousand Things, the author notes that, in the war, Japanese spies would often approach checkpoints posing as American or Filipino military personnel. A shibboleth such as "lollapalooza" would be used by the sentry, who, if the first two syllables come back as rorra, would "open fire without waiting to hear the remainder".[7]

    Prior to the Guldensporenslag, the Flemish slaughtered every Frenchman they could find in the city of Bruges. They are said to have identified Frenchmen based on their inability to pronounce the phrase "Scilt ende Vriend" ("Shield and Friend"), or possibly "'s Guilden vriend" ("Friend of the Guilds").

    Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries (Schibbolet-fries.ogg example ) means "Butter, rye bread and green cheese, who cannot say that is not a genuine Frisian" was used by the Frisian Pier Gerlofs Donia during a Frisian rebellion war (1515-1523). Ships whose crew could not pronounce this properly were usually plundered and soldiers who could not were beheaded by Donia himself.[8]

    See also

    References

    1. ^ "shibboleth" (second ed.). 1989. 
    2. ^ "shibboleth". Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. http://m-w.com/dictionary/shibboleth. 
    3. ^ Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch, Sixth Edition and "Schibboleth". Meyers Lexikon online. http://lexikon.meyers.de/meyers/Schibboleth. 
    4. ^ "shibboleth". American Heritage Dictionary, also sometimes rye, Fourth Edition. http://www.tfd.com/shibboleth.  "shibboleth". Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. http://m-w.com/dictionary/shibboleth.  (this latter meaning is not in use in Modern Hebrew)
    5. ^ Cf. Isaiah 27:12.
    6. ^ US Army & Navy, 1942. HOW TO SPOT A JAP Educational Comic Strip, (from US govt's POCKET GUIDE TO CHINA, 1st edition). Retrieved 10-10-2007
    7. ^ Stimpson, George W. (1946). A Book about a Thousand Things. Harper & Brothers. pp. 51. 
    8. ^ "Greate Pier fan Wûnseradiel" (in West Frisian). Gemeente Wûnseradiel. http://www.wunseradiel.nl/index.php?simaction=content&pagid=289&mediumid=1. Retrieved 2008-01-04. 

    External links


    Translations: Shibboleth
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    Dansk (Danish)
    n. - shibbolet, løsen, kendingsord

    Nederlands (Dutch)
    wachtwoord, slogan

    Français (French)
    n. - principe

    Deutsch (German)
    n. - Schlagwort

    Ελληνική (Greek)
    n. - σλόγκαν, παρασύνθημα, αναγνωριστικό κοινωνικής τάξεως

    Italiano (Italian)
    attitudine, formula, dottrina, parola d'ordine

    Português (Portuguese)
    n. - antiga doutrina (f), princípio ultrapassado (m)

    Русский (Russian)
    шибболет, примета, тайный пароль, ходячее словечко, традиционное предубеждение

    Español (Spanish)
    n. - lema, consigna, contraseña

    Svenska (Swedish)
    n. - schibbolet, lösenord, slagord

    中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
    口令

    中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
    n. - 口令

    한국어 (Korean)
    n. - 음의 발음을 할 수 있는지 없는지를 시험해 보는 말, (정당인 등의) 표어, 시볼레스 (특정 계급이나 집단의 특수한 발음, 말씨 등)

    日本語 (Japanese)
    n. - 合いことば, 独特な習慣, 陳腐なことば, 試し言葉, 決まり文句

    العربيه (Arabic)
    ‏(الاسم) شعار أجوف, تصرف أو سلوك معين يميز بين الطبقات في المجتمع‏

    עברית (Hebrew)
    n. - ‮סיסמה, ניב מיושן, מנהג עתיק, מנהג, תורה, ביטוי וכו' המאפיינים קבוצת אנשים מסוימת‬


     
     
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    Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Word Origins. The World in So Many Words, by Allan A. Metcalf. Copyright © 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more
    Bible Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Obscure Words. © 2008 by Michael A. Fischer http://home.comcast.net/~wwftd Read more
    Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Shibboleth" Read more
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