A shibboleth ( ;) is any custom or tradition—usually a choice of phrasing or single word—that distinguishes one group of people from another. Historically, shibboleths have been used as passwords, ways of self-identification, signals of loyalty and affinity, ways of maintaining traditional segregation, or protection from threats. The word has also come to mean a moral formula held tenaciously and unreflectingly.Oxford English Dictionary Online, Shibboleth, Additional sense.
Origin The term originates from the Hebrew word ( in Modern Hebrew), which means the part of a plant containing grain, such as the ear of a stalk of wheat or rye, or less commonly (but arguably more appropriately) "flood, torrent".
Biblical account The modern use derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect used a different first consonant, from Gileadites. The difference concerns the Hebrew letter shin, which is now pronounced as (as in shoe), a sound also transcribed as š. In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead under the command of Jephthah inflicted a military defeat upon the invading tribe of Ephraim (c. 1370–1070 BCE), the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the River Jordan back into their home territory, but the Gileadites secured the river's fords to stop them. To identify and kill these Ephraimites, the Gileadites told each suspected survivor to say the word shibboleth. The Ephraimite dialect resulted in a pronunciation that, to Gileadites, sounded like sibboleth. In Judges 12:5–6 in the King James Bible, the anecdote appears thus (with the word already in its current English spelling):
Phonetics of the biblical test Shibboleth has been described as the first "password" in Western literature, but exactly how it worked is not known; it has long been debated by scholars of Semitic languages. 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".. On a superficial reading, the fleeing Ephraimites were betrayed by their dialect: they said sibbōlet. Questions have been raised about why the Ephraimites did not simply repeat what the Gileadite sentries told them to say, since peoples in the region could pronounce both the and /s/ sounds.According to Speiser, "We have no knowledge of any West Semitic language that fails to include both š and s as independent phonemes": Speiser (1942), 10-11."The phonemic distinction of š : s is preserved in all known Northwest Semitic dialects of the Iron Age": Hendel (1996), 70. Assyriologist Ephraim Avigdor Speiser has said, "We have yet to learn how the suspects were caught by the catchword… [the Ephraimites] surely would have used the required sound to save their necks." 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.
Speiser has proposed that the test involved a more challenging sound than could be written down in the later biblical Hebrew narrative, namely the phoneme (≈ English "th"). It was present in archaic Hebrew according to Speiser, but later merged with in Canaanite Semitic dialects. The Gileadites, who lived across a dialect boundary (the Jordan), had retained in theirs. Therefore, what the Gileadite guards would have demanded was the password thibbōlet. 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. Speiser's solution has had a mixed receptionDavid Marcus said it was "virtually the norm in Biblical scholarship" (Marcus, 1992, 96), while Woodhouse did not even include it in his list of proposals deserving serious consideration: Woodhouse (2003). It has been criticised for lack of evidential support in cognate Semitic languages (Emerton, 2014, 251) and for not tackling the false positives problem, since neutral Hebrew-speaking tribes could not have said "th" either (Marcus, 1992, 98). but has been revived by Gary A. Rendsburg.
John Emerton argues, "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." There is a range of ways of pronouncing the two phonemes. "An old clergyman of my acquaintance used to say 'O Lord, save the Queen' in such a way that it sounded [to me] like 'O Lord, shave the Queen'", and analogies could be found amongst Hebrew users in modern Lithuania and Morocco. Berkeley scholar Ronald Hendel agreed, saying the theory was supported by a document recently dug up near modern Amman showing that, across the Jordan, the pronunciation of the phoneme was heard as /s/ by Hebrew speakers from the opposite bank. Hendel explained, "This is why Gileadite šibbōlet is repeated by the Ephraimites as sibbōlet: they simply repeated the word as they heard it." Other solutions have been proposed.They are mentioned in the sources cited in this section.
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. [...] [T]he shibboleth episode ridicules the Ephraimites who are portrayed as incompetent nincompoops who cannot even repeat a test-word spoken by the Gileadite guards."
Modern use In Modern English, shibboleth can have a sociological meaning, referring to any in-group word or phrase that can distinguish members from outsiders. It 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.
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. The origin server can vouch for the identity of the individual user without giving the target server any further identifying information.. Thus, the individual user does not know the password that is actually employed—as it is generated internally by the origin server—and so it cannot be betrayed to outsiders.
The term can also be used pejoratively, suggesting that the original meaning of a symbol has in effect been lost, and that the symbol now serves merely to identify allegiance, being described as "nothing more than a shibboleth". In 1956, economist Paul Samuelson applied the term shibboleth in works, including Foundations of Economic Analysis, to mean an idea for which "the means becomes the end, and the letter of the law takes precedence over the spirit". Samuelson admitted that shibboleth is an imperfect term for this phenomenon.
In the context of artificial intelligence, the concept has emerged to signify AI markers and users' detection efforts.
Examples
Shibboleths have been used by different subcultures throughout the world at different times. Regional differences, levels of expertise, and computer coding techniques are several forms that shibboleths have taken.
In Sicily, an anecdote recalls that during Sicilian Vespers uprising in 1282, the inhabitants of the island killed the French occupiers who, when questioned, could not correctly pronounce the Sicilian word ("chickpeas").
One legend has it that before the Battle of the Golden Spurs in May 1302, the Flemish slaughtered every Frenchman they could find in the city of Bruges, an act known as the Matins of Bruges. They identified Frenchmen based on their inability to pronounce the Flemish phrase schild en vriend, "shield and friend", or possibly gilden vriend, "friend of the Guilds". However, many Medieval Flemish dialects did not contain the cluster sch-, either (even today's Kortrijkèdialect usees sk-), and Medieval French rolled the r just as Flemish did.
Following Mayor Albert's Rebellion in 1312 Kraków, Poles used the Polish language shibboleth Soczewica, koło, miele, młyn ("Lentil, wheel, grinds [verb], mill") to expose German-speaking burghers. Those who could not properly pronounce this phrase were executed.
("Butter, rye bread, and green cheese, whoever cannot say that is not a genuine Frisian") was a phrase used by the Frisian Pier Gerlofs Donia during the rebellion of Arumer Zwarte Hoop (1515–1523). Ships whose crews could not pronounce this properly were usually plundered, and soldiers who could not were beheaded by Donia.
Newspaper advertisements in the 18th-century United States seeking runaway servants or apprentices frequently used the shibboleth method to identify them. Since most runaways were from the British Isles originally, they were identified by their distinctive regional accents (e.g., "speaks broad Yorkshire)". Studying a large number of these advertisements, Allen Walker Read noticed an exception: runaways were never advertised as having London or eastern counties accents. From this, he inferred that their speech did not differ from the bulk of the American population. Read concluded, "[T]hus in the colonial period American English had a consistency of its own, most closely approximating the type of the region around London."
In Japan during the 1923 Kantō Massacre, in which ethnic Koreans in Japan were hunted down and killed by vigilantes after rumors spread that they were committing crimes, shibboleths were attested to having been used to identify Koreans. The Japanese poet Shigeji Tsuboi wrote that he overheard vigilantes asking people to pronounce the phrase jūgoen gojissen (). If the person pronounced it as chūkoen kochissen, he was reportedly dragged away for punishment. Both Korean and Japanese people recalled similar shibboleths being used, including ichien gojissen (). Other strings attested to were ga-gi-gu-ge-go () and ka-ki-ku-ke-ko (), which were thought difficult for Koreans to pronounce.
In October 1937, the Spanish word for parsley, , was used as a shibboleth to identify Haitian immigrants living along the border in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ordered their execution. It is alleged that between 20,000 and 30,000 individuals were murdered within a few days during 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.
During the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, the Dutch used the name of the seaside town of Scheveningen as a shibboleth to discern Germans from Dutch ("Sch" in Dutch is analyzed as the letter "s" combined with the digraph "ch", producing the consonant cluster , while in German "Sch" is read as the trigraph "sch", pronounced , closer to "sh" in English)."Zonder ons erbij te betrekken" Retrieved on 23 december 2011Corstius, H. B. (1981) Opperlandse taal- & letterkunde, Querido's Uitgeverij, Amsterdam. Retrieved on 23 december 2011