Word of the Day: “shibboleth”

Since most of you have pretty much memorized your Bibles (right?), you hardly need me to remind you of the origin of -- well, not the word, but the political significance of the word, shibboleth.

The word is Hebrew.  It denotes an ear of grain, as does the Arabic cognate, sunbulah (which itself figures in the Koran).  Noticing the Hebrew sh- versus Arabic s-, you can already guess where this is going.

Turns out that the Gileadites and the Ephraimites  (hey, not knocking either of them; some of my best friends are Ephraimites)  pronounced this word differently, sort of along the lines of thhrrrrrrty-thhrrrrrd street  versus  toity-toid street.   Let the Old Testament tell it:

Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say "Shibboleth" (שבלת).' If anyone said, "Sibboleth" (סבלת), because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion.

    —Judges 12:5-6

Since that time, the word has passed into common usage -- not (obviously) denoting an ear of corn,  nor even with phonetic reference  (Wikipedia is here misleading in suggesting that the original “Judges” scenario is still foremost in people’s minds):  but rather referring to some meme or catch-phrase, to which obeissance must be paid, in certain self-defined groups.

Yet it turns out that there is a much more contemporary (by a couple of millennia) version of this, in which life or death really did turn upon the articulation of a phoneme:  the “Parsley Massacre” of 1937, where over ten thousand Haitians were slaughtered by Dominicans -- not in the context of any upheaval, but  apparently  simply on a whim. 

It earned the moniker Parsley Massacre because some soldiers carried a parsley sprig and asked suspected Haitians to pronounce the Spanish word for it, perejil. Mispronunciation of the “R” in the word – difficult for native creole speakers – was enough to get you killed.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2012/1009/Haitians-Dominicans-try-to-move-beyond-Parsley-Massacre-s-long-shadow

Linguistically interesting -- actually, for speakers of Parisian French both the Spanish “r” and the  Spanish “j” present articulatory problems.   But psychopolitically interesting as well, in that (note):

(a)  Many more people died that day  than died on 9/11.

(b)  As a proportion of the Haitian population, way more.

(c)  You’ve never heard of this.

(d)  You don’t care.

Just sayin’…