8 ms·

This is (hopefully not) obnoxiously off-topic... As a Hebrew speaker, I wish the "shibboleth" idiom (which is a good one) was translated, rather than translite

• leipert 7y ago
  Yes. I am a native German speaker, and apart from grammar (people usually have a bit of trouble with cases, articles and particles) there are a few nice words to trip people up: - Streichholzschächtelchen (match box – diminutive): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De-Streichholzsch%C3%A4chtelchen.ogg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De-Streichholzsch%C3... - Austrians use a lot of different words, my favorite being Jänner and not Januar for the month January - Swiss German: Chuchichäschtli (small kitchen cup board) which is hard to pronounce, apparently Arab, Dutch and Hebrew speakers are at an advantage here.: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chuchichaeschtli.ogg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chuchichaeschtli.ogg - Another fun thing, different words for bread rolls depending where you are from: http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/9_01h.jpg http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...
  • netcan 7y ago
    Funny on the the swiss example. I was just thinking: that's not hard to say! Hebrew is well adapted to dealing with words made mostly made from subtle variations of s, sh & t sounds... Which brings us full circle to shibboleth/שיבולת
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • fortran77 7y ago
      It's שבלת when referring to the biblical use. You got the modern spelling of the word for "oatmeal" from google translate. See https://www.sefaria.org/Judges.12.6?lang=bi https://www.sefaria.org/Judges.12.6?lang=bi for the source.
      • hermanKM 7y ago
        Both spellings are correct ( שיבולת and שבלת ). Netcan is using the standardized Rules for Spelling without vowel pointers (Niqqud) enacted by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which is rejected by some Hebrew language purists. The rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ktiv_hasar_niqqud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ktiv_hasar_niqqud
  • trollied 7y ago
    > different words for bread rolls depending where you are from This is also a British thing: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/food/articles-reports/2018/07/19/cobs-buns-baps-or-barm-cakes-what-do-people-call-b https://yougov.co.uk/topics/food/articles-reports/2018/07/19...
  • FabHK 7y ago
    Allegedly, during the invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi forces commencing on May 10th, 1940, the Dutch used "Scheveningen" or "beschuit" as a shibboleth to distinguish German speakers from Dutch. I don't quite understand that, as most Germans don't speak Dutch, full stop, and it would be trivial to distinguish them thereby, while presumably if you have gone to the trouble of learning Dutch, you'd know how to pronounce "Scheveningen". At any rate, that story is often cited, eg in this insightful article that has many more examples: Mcnamara, T. "21st Century Shibboleth: Language Tests, Identity and Intergroup Conflict " Lang Policy (2005) 4: 351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-005-2886-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-005-2886-0
    • hprotagonist 7y ago
      > while presumably if you have gone to the trouble of learning Dutch, you'd know how to pronounce "Scheveningen". It’s actually hard to do. This is a good choice of shibboleth. I’d propose “squirrel” as an english word to find german speakers. Famously, pacific theater allied forces occasionally used “lollapalooza” as a shibboleth, also for fairly obvious reasons.
      • leipert 7y ago
        Ha. That is nice, because Eichhörnchen (squirrel) is also a hard one in German.
        • hprotagonist 7y ago
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FRD4uq1mVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FRD4uq1mVw both ways :)
        • mhink 7y ago
          The same issue exists in French, as well! "Écureuil" (squirrel) is somewhat difficult for English speakers to pronounce, and "squirrel" (écureuil) is somewhat difficult for French speakers to pronounce.
    • indocomsoft 7y ago
• chillydawg 7y ago
  Is using the word shibboleth a shibboleth? I never really understood it until now and have never and probably wouldn't use it.
  • EliRivers 7y ago
    The word itself was the original shibboleth; used to identify fleeing Ephraimites. It did not go well for those Ephraimites thus identifed.
    • afarrell 7y ago
      The word "lollapalooza" was used similarly in night-fighting against the Japanese in WWII.
      • ptaipale 7y ago
        My father was a veteran of WWII, in the Finnish army fighting the Soviets. In (I think) 1972, I was a 6-year-old kid, and we went to the town 60 km away (we did not go there very often). Suddenly, my father exclaimed "Hei yks!" (Finnish for "hello one!") to a man on the street. Then they greeted and spoke quietly for quite a while. I didn't understand it at all. Only much later I realized that the other man was a brother-in-arms of my father, and "Hei yks!" was the shibboleth of their unit; it had been devised for a night-time attack in very extreme conditions in February 1942, and the men in the brigade then used it throughout the war to identify each other whenever there was no mission-specific one defined. Russians cannot very well pronounce the y in "yks" the way Finns do. (This was of course no strong guarantee because the Soviet army had some native Finnish-speakers, but most were not.)
    • FabHK 7y ago
      Specifically, Judges 12:4-6: 4 Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, “You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” 5 The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” 6 they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
• m4r35n357 7y ago
  Some good ones for US/UK: fanny, fag or if you are polite: pants
• aasasd 7y ago
  > I wish the "shibboleth" idiom (which is a good one) was translated, rather than transliterated. [...] A good modern example is "LondonDerry/Derry. This'd be my choice for an English translation of shibboleth. Well, the thing is, I'm not an Englishman so have no idea what's the deal with ‘Derry’ is, but I know what a shibboleth is. It has become an English term—and btw not an idiom in English since it has no other meaning in that language.
  • ValentineC 7y ago
    > I'm not an Englishman so have no idea what's the deal with ‘Derry’ is I had to look it up too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derry/Londonderry_name_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derry/Londonderry_name_dispute
  • netcan 7y ago
    I agree. Terms become terms and we can't change it. I just meant that idioms tend to be richer when the source is material. Point taken on finding an example that everyone understands. Any political context creates shibboleths by the dozen. The UK is good for making ones that stick around. "Nationist" and "National" political movements, for example, are apposite (and opposing).
    • aasasd 7y ago
      Yeah no, don't do that. After reading about the Derry thing, I realized I better forget all about it and never mention it in the presence of an Irishman, a Northern-Irishman or anyone else from GB, and especially not botch my reference to any one side. ‘Shibboleth’ has the nice quality that no Ephraimites recently had, or are likely to soon have, misfortunes because of the phenomenon, and the whole affair was three thousand years ago. Where I'm from, some people, having nothing better to do, occasionally raise noise saying that ‘to each his own’ is offensive because it happened to be written by Nazis on a concentration camp. I don't think I need any more unnecessarily politically aroused stubborn people around than there already are.
      • deleted 7y ago
• tempguy9999 7y ago
  "patio"? I assumed you meant Patois, but I'm not sure now.
  • vermilingua 7y ago
    patio as in @patio11, as in the author of that thread.
    • netcan 7y ago
      yup, thanks.
• sukilot 7y ago
  I'm not Irish, so Derry is just as exotic as shibboleth. English is made of Greek and Latin and German and more; it's weird to say that one of those languages is exotic, but weirder still to level that complaint against the oldest known word whose meaning hinges on it being intentionally exotic. Finally, Londonderry/Derry is a disagreement, not a shibboleth. Shibboleth is about having the ability to pass as a native, not the preference to do so. In modern IT terms, It's something you are, not something you know.
  • netcan 7y ago
    It's also a disagreement. In practice and common language though, the choice of words gives you information about the speaker.
    • peteretep 7y ago
      But it can be faked, in a way that a Shibboleth can’t
• dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
  > Shiboleths can have serious weight Yeah "shibboleth" carries a really serious (life/death) connotation for me as well. Was confused to see it here like this.
  • ljm 7y ago
    I think Inglorious Basterds captures this quite well, in the underground bar scene where the use of three fingers to gesture ‘three’, as opposed to a thumb and two fingers. That blew the Brits’ cover and resulted in their deaths.
• coldtea 7y ago
  >As a Hebrew speaker, I wish the "shibboleth" idiom (which is a good one) was translated, rather than transliterated. laoned idioms are inherently exotic, and this one is worth demystifying Well, it was neither translated, nor transliterated. It was adopted as an english word, with its own dictionary definition and everything. The definition happens to coincide with the Hebrew, but it could just as well not (there are loaners that have changed definition). As far as an English speaking person hears the term, whether they know the meaning or not, it's just any other English word -- they can ask people for its meaning, look it up in the dictionary, etc. The Hebrew origins don't come into play at all, except when one specifically looks for the history/etymology of the term. But it can totally be used as a black box word too.
  • freehunter 7y ago
    That's (for better or worse) an almost defining characteristic of the English language. We take words from other languages and adopt them as English words. It doesn't matter if the word in English means the same thing as the original word, it doesn't matter what language it came from, it doesn't matter if we're combining two words from different languages to make a new word (television is the Greek word 'tele' combined with the Latin word 'visio'). English is an incredibly dynamic language with very loose rules. If a loanword sounds exotic, well that's half the fun.
    • paradoja 7y ago
      Well, that's not a defining characteristic of English but of most (all?) living, dynamic languages. I have seen it with the languages I speak or have tried to learn (Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese...).
      • coldtea 7y ago
        Most of those languages though change the original words to suit the language (e.g. with gendered nouns, certain suffixes, changing the spelling, etc). English tends to just copy, at least from other latin-script languages...
    • 7y ago
• 80386 7y ago
  > As a Hebrew speaker, I wish the "shibboleth" idiom (which is a good one) was translated, rather than transliterated. laoned idioms are inherently exotic, and this one is worth demystifying Until a few decades ago, it was assumed in educated Protestant society that everyone was familiar with the Bible. So a lot of biblical idioms are still present.
  • netcan 7y ago
    Hmm. I now just realized that the biblical translators must have chosen to transliterate the word, not translate it. It's probably because in context its about how the word is pronounced, not meaning. In any case, I guess the idiom would have never taken off with the word "corn."
    • acqq 7y ago
      You can compare the different translations, even through the centuries, here: Vulgate, cc 4th century CE: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A5-6&version=VULGATE https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A5-6... Luther, 1545: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A6&version=LUTH1545 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A6&v... King James Bible (1611): https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A6&version=KJV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A6&v... Septuagint (the Greek translation, older than all above, around 3rd century BCE) didn't keep that word as is: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/shibboleth-in-the-septuagint.2391146/ https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/shibboleth-in-the-se... "the LXX scholars had difficulties translating the Hebrew word שבלת Shibboleth into Greek, for the simple reason, Greek lacks the phoneme [ʃ]"
• fortran77 7y ago
  And for those wondering where it comes from (us Hebrew speakers know, unless we don't pay attention during Haftorah...) here's in the Tanach where the word שבלת is used: https://www.sefaria.org/Judges.12.6?lang=bi https://www.sefaria.org/Judges.12.6?lang=bi In Modern Hebrew the term with the modern spelling "שיבולת שועל" is used to mean "Oatmeal"
• GuB-42 7y ago
  Maybe you can partly blame xkcd for the transliteration. https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/
• sudosteph 7y ago
  A good one in the Southern U.S. is the pronunciation of the word "Appalachian". I'm from NC and whenever I hear someone say "Appa-lay-shin" I immediately know they aren't local and I start acting a little different accordingly. Not in a mean way, but I know I can't open up completely to those people because from experience I know they might judge me according to stereotypes about that region.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    How would you pronounce it? Appa-lah-chi-an?
    • sudosteph 7y ago
      App-uh-LATCH-in
    • cjslep 7y ago
      I'm originally from NC but the piedmont region (Charlotte), not the mountains, and would say "Appa-LA-chin". ("La" rhymes with the "a" in "matt") Making the long-a sound ("la"->"lay"), or both long-a and "ch"->"sh", is common from northerners who have (or still are) moving to the city from elsewhere.
      • sudosteph 7y ago
        Yep, and that's the same pronunciation used in Western NC too (ie, how locals say "Appalachian State" in Boone).
• antonvs 7y ago
  I don't understand what you're saying about Derry. It's an example of a shibboleth, but it wouldn't be a translation of the word. It's also pretty obscure for most people outside of Ireland.
• forgotmypwd123 7y ago
  I feel obligated to say, I THINK YOU'LL FIND THAT'S DERRY/LONDONDERRY, SON.
  • netcan 7y ago
    Is it? I don't think anyone but the city council and BBC use the hyphen.
    • forgotmypwd123 7y ago
      Or the civil service. I'm sure there's plenty of dickheads would still want derry put first even when using both, though
• CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > These tweets are about hacking shibboleths, which is advanced mode. Basic mode would be just noticing shibboleths, and also why and how they so clearly identify speakers. Yeah. Also using the word "shibboleth" for "advance mode" make some sense, but seems like an uncommon usage. To me, has strong connotations of the "basic mode," i.e. a word use that indirectly gives away someones identity.