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.
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".
[17][18] 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".
[19] In modern English, a shibboleth can have a sociological meaning, referring to any in-group word or phrase that can distinguish members from outsiders.
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.
