29 Feb /16

Shibboleth

Sibboleth - Word of the day - EVS Translations
Sibboleth – Word of the day – EVS Translations

Many of our Word-of-the-day entries include terms that have come to us through Greek or Latin; that derive from Anglo-saxon; or which can be explained by the place of English in the West Germanic family of languages. If you go back far enough along the language family tree, you arrive at PIE, or Proto Indo-European (4500 to 2500 B.C.), which is the common ancestor for the Indo-European languages now found across Europe, and parts of Western, Central and South Asia.

Today, however, we look at the term shibboleth which can be found in an English dictionary but comes to us from an entirely different language family; that is, the Afro-Asiatic family. It’s from here that the Semitic group of languages evolved which contains Arabic, Berber, Amharic, Hebrew and many other languages found in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel. Shibboleth, as you might guess, is a term used in Hebrew and entered into the English language in 1382 when John Wycliffe, an English scholar, philosopher and theologian, translated a fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible into Middle English. It’s not known to what extent Wycliffe understood Hebrew and how dependent he was on Greek material to produce his translation; nevertheless, in his work the word shibboleth appeared and hundreds of years later it entered into EVS Translations’ list of interesting words to write about.

If you’re not sure how to pronounce the word shibboleth, you are not the only one.

In the Book of Judges is the account of the Ephraimites and their attempted invasion of Gilead. The Gileadites, upon thwarting this attack, used a cunning language test to determine whether a person fleeing the scene via the River Jordan was an escapee Ephramite or not. It may have been the first time in history that a handy phoneme saved the day—and this phoneme was ‘sh’.

The ‘sh’ to an Ephraimite was like the English ‘l’ and ‘r’ to a Japanese: what on earth do you do with your mouth and your tongue to get that pronunciation correct?! Thankfully, for the Japanese, there are no dire consequences for completely mispronouncing a sentence like “I really like London”, but for the Ehpraimites, being unable to put the ‘sh’ in shibboleth resulted in certain death. This was not a phoneme that featured in their dialect so, when confronted with the order to pronounce shibboleth (‘ear of corn’), the Ephraimite-in-question would have gulped long and hard and yelped something like sibboleth, thus revealing their true identity. Gileadite victory was secured on shoddy pronunciation.

Over the centuries, shibboleth became a term in English to describe word or sound that a person can’t pronounce or which could be used to detect a foreigner. A good example of its use can be found in John Earle’s The Philology of the English Tongue (1873) where he explains: “The TH with its twofold value is one of the most characteristic features of our language, and more than any other the Shibboleth of foreigners”.

The meaning of shibboleth was eventually extended to describe the catchword of a party or sect or a custom or belief that distinguished a particular class or group of people from others: “She has assumed the garb and even the shibboleth of the sect” (1829, R. Southey, Sir Thomas More).

You are unlikely to use the word shibboleth in conversation anytime soon; however, it’s sometimes happens that the most seemingly obscure words tell the most interesting stories.