So you know how every language has that word/phrase/sentence that native speakers can pronounce just fine, but foreigners can almost never pronounce it correctly? And the natives have a lot of fun telling the foreigners to try and say it and laughing at their attempts?
They’re called Shibboleths, and wikipedia has a whole article on them.
Even better, wikipedia has a whole article on examples of them.Some of them are ridiculous, I can’t stop reading this article.
Wow. Cheers for this.
“Art thou an Ephraimite?”
“Um, uh … No?”
“Prove it. Say ‘shibboleth.’”
“Sibboleth.”
“Aha! Die Ephraimite!”
“Oh sit.”
re: your tags, native speakers of hebrew probably, not native speakers of english
Well, English is known for its extensive use of “th”, and that’s where the problem comes in for me. (In fact, the original Hebrew word might have used a perfectly pronounceable “t”, though it’s not clear from a few minutes of looking things up.)
dunno, don’t speak hebrew. but the shibboleth part of the shibboleth is the sh sound.
according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbólet (שִׁבֹּלֶת), which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk ofgrain[3] or, in different contexts, “stream, torrent”.[4][5]
which means that you would be able to pronounce it, because it was shibbólet, not shibbóleth :)
Yeah, I saw that, but then I saw the Wiki page on Hebrew pronunciation in general:
Some historically distinctive Hebrew phonemes have merged in modern Hebrew, such as historically distinctive /t/, /θ/, /tˤ/ (now all [t]), written respectively by the letters Tav (תּ), Ṯav (ת) and Ṭet (ט).
This would seem to imply (note the use of tav-with-no-dot in the Hebrew you quoted, for whatever that’s worth) that it was soft-“th” at the time and only became “t” later.
(What do you do if someone fails a shibboleth in an unexpected manner? People who say “shibbolef” aren’t the kind of Them you’re killing on sight (well, hearing), but they’re not Us either.)
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#language #reply via reblog #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #fun wif forn fronting
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