Shibboleth
A shibboleth (/ˈʃɪbəlɛθ, -ɪθ/ ⓘ;[1][2] Biblical Hebrew: שִׁבֹּלֶת, romanized: šībbōleṯ) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.
The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbóleth (שִׁבֹּלֶת), which means the part of a plant containing grain, such as the ear of a stalk of wheat or rye;[5][6][2][7] or less commonly (but arguably more appropriately)[a] 'flood, torrent'.
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.Shibboleth has been described as the first "password" in Western literature[12]: 93 but exactly how it worked is not known; it has long been debated by scholars of Semitic languages.
[13][14] It may have been quite subtle: the men of Ephraim were unlikely to be "caught totally napping by any test that involved some gross and readily detectable difference of pronunciation";[15]: 274 On a superficial reading the fleeing Ephraimites were betrayed by their dialect: they said sibbōleth.
But it has been asked why they did not simply repeat what the Gileadite sentries told them to say[13]: 250 — "they surely would have used the required sound to save their necks",[16] since peoples in the region could say both "sh" and "s".
[16] A related problem (akin to false positives) is how the test spared neutral tribes with whom the Gileadite guards had no quarrel, yet pinpointed the Ephraimite enemy.
[19]: 98 Ephraim Avigdor Speiser therefore proposed that the test involved a more challenging sound than could be written down in the later biblical Hebrew narrative, namely the phoneme ⟨θ⟩ (≈ English "th").
The phoneme is difficult for naive users — to this day, wrote Speiser, most non-Arab Muslims cannot pronounce the classical Arabic equivalent — hence the best the Ephraimite refugees could manage was sibbōlet.
[21] John Emerton argued that "Perhaps [the Ephraimites] could pronounce š, but they articulated the consonant in a different way from the Gileadites, and their pronunciation sounded to the men of Gilead like s".
[22] David Marcus has contended that linguistic scholars have missed the point of the biblical anecdote: The purpose of the later Judean narrator was not to record some phonetic detail, but to satirise the incompetence of "the high and mighty northern Ephraimites".
In information technology, Shibboleth is a community-wide password that enables members of that community to access an online resource without revealing their individual identities.
[28] Following Mayor Albert's Rebellion in 1312 Kraków, Poles used the Polish language shibboleth Soczewica, koło, miele, młyn ('Lentil, wheel, grinds (verb), mill') to distinguish the German-speaking burghers.
[33] In October 1937, the Spanish word for parsley, perejil, was used as a shibboleth to identify Haitian immigrants living along the border in the Dominican Republic.
It is alleged that between 20,000 and 30,000 individuals were murdered within a few days in the Parsley Massacre, although more recent scholarship and the lack of evidence such as mass graves puts the actual estimate closer to between 1,000 and 12,168.
[36][37][23] Some American soldiers in the Pacific theater in World War II used the word lollapalooza as a shibboleth to challenge unidentified persons, on the premise that Japanese people would often pronounce both letters L and R as rolled Rs.
[40] This was used during D-Day during World War II due to the rarity of the voiceless dental fricative (th-sound) and voiced labial–velar approximant (w-sound) in German.
In many cases these massacres took the form of boarding buses and getting the passengers to pronounce words that had [b] at the beginning (like baldiya 'bucket') and executing the people who found it difficult.
[45] A long drawn out pronunciation of the names of the cities Brisbane and Melbourne rather than the typically Australian rapid "bun" ending is a common way for someone to be exposed as new to the country.
[50] Similarly, during World War II, a homosexual US sailor might call himself a "friend of Dorothy", a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of a stereotypical affinity for Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.
This code was so effective that the Naval Investigative Service, upon learning that the phrase was a way for gay sailors to identify each other, undertook a search for this "Dorothy", whom they believed to be an actual woman with connections to homosexual servicemen in the Chicago area.
