Bulbul‘s latest post is about shibboleths he’s “recently encountered in works of fiction” (and may I point out, enviously, that this Slovak who blogs in excellent English reads novels in Dutch and Polish, and I’ll bet several other languages as well, without batting an eye). The first, from Paul Verhoeven’s Soldaat van Oranje, involves two guys (dressed in tuxedos) trying to get into the Netherlands to help fight the Germans in 1940; suspicious border guards make them say Scheveningen [sxe:vənɪŋə] to prove they’re Dutch. The second, from Andrzej Sapkowski’s Narrenturm, has the Silesian protagonist having to prove his Polishness by saying soczewica, koło, miele, młyn [sot͡ʂeviʦa, kowo, miele, mwɨn], apparently a traditional shibboleth; he retaliates by telling the ferryman to say stół z powyłamywanymi nogami [stuw s povɨwamɨvanɨmi nogami], a Polish tongue twister. Fun stuff, and you’ll want to read bulbul’s explications and additions.
Unrelated, but in case anyone in interested in the acoustics of the theater at Epidaurus (I was there, and you really can hear a whisper from the stage in the back row), Nature has an interesting article on the subject (via Anggarrgoon).
This wikipedia article is a real gem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Wow, it sure is—they have both the Dutch and Polish ones, as well as many, many others! Here‘s the direct link, and thanks!
would be more accurate as [mjele] (that’s not counting palatalised consonants, vowel quality etc.)
Er, ‘miele’ would.
You’re probably right, but I just copied what bulbul had.
While it’s still impressive that the original poster can do it in Dutch, Paul Verhoeven’s Soldaat van Oranje was a film adaptation of a novel by the same name, not a novel itself. It is an excellent movie, as I can personally attest, but it is not the case that the same man who brought us the film of Starship Troopers wrote a novel about the Second World War!
AJ,
you are, naturally, perfectly correct: [mjele] or perhaps [mʲjele] would have been more acurrate.
“Höyryjyrä”, that’s the Finnish one I could not remember! “Löylyä” was another one the Finns used on me :o)
Your comments about the remarkable acoustic properties of Epidaurus (constructed when?) were interesting.
There is a Roman theatre at Jerash, in Jordan, built sometime in the first few centuries AD, where exactly the same happens. I sat on the uppermost tier, and asked someone else to go down onto the stage and say a few words at conversational level.
I could hear, and understand, exactly what they said.
When the Brit Victorians built the Albert Hall, they consciously constructed to the same ‘Classical’ design, while knowing nothing about acoustics (the word wasn’t even invented then) but got the right results.
That’s why the ‘Ancient Rockers’ like Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, etc prefer to play the Albert Hall (opened 1871) than the Festival Hall (opened in the early 1950s, and forever re-jigged acoustically, since – it re-opens in June 2007)
There are Roman/Greek theatres scattered all around the Mediterranean with roughly the same properties.
Our sainted William Shaksper tried, with Burbage & co, to build the Globe Theatre with the same properties, but it more or less followed the design of the simplest of Syrian village theatres built at least a thousand years before.
regards
Richard Parker
Siargao Island, The Philippines.
My website at http://www.coconutstudio.com is about the island and its people, coastal early humans, fishing, coconuts, bananas and whatever took my fancy at the time.
on miele: I think [mʲele] might be best, since after some consonants softening [ʲ] and the palatal glide [j] are contrasted (though this is not indicated in writing).
As in dania [‘danʲa] ‘dishes (components of a meal)’ and Dania [‘danja] ‘Denmark’
I quote from J.J. Voskuil’s newest book Onder andere: “De 14e [may, 1940 is meant – bertil], de dag van het bombardement op Rotterdam en de capitulatie, deed mijn vader de voordeur op slot en reden we met zijn vijven in een taxi naar mijn oom en tante in Voorburg. (…) Aan het begin van de Javastraat, vlak bij het plein 1813, werden we aangehouden en moest mijn vader door het raampje tegen een soldaat uit Limburg `Scheveningen’ zeggen om vast te stellen of hij een Nederlander was.”
Summary: the author’s father had to use the shibboleth Scheveningen in may 1940, when the Germans attacked Holland, to show that he was Dutch. Since this book is supposed to be autobiographical I think the usage of this Shibboleth was already common in the beginning of the war, unlike Bulbul states in his post.
Michael,
it’s [‘daɲa] vs [‘daɲja].
‘Miele’ is [‘mʲjele] (or actually [‘mʲjelɛ]) in my speech, so I’ll stick to that.
How would you treat the dania, Dania (fotografie, fotografie etc etc) phonemically?
And what about words like zilustrowany (would it begin [zji-] or [z?i-]*?
* ? for glottal stop
Hah. I was going to chime in with the Australian-New Zealand “fish and chips” shibboleth, but there it is in Wikipedia. Far out.
acoustics (the word wasn’t even invented then)
In 1683 Narcissus Marsh, Bishop of Ferns and Leighlin Marsh, wrote one of the Dublin Philosophical Society’s first papers, called “An Introductory Essay on the Doctrine of Sounds, Containing some Proposals for the Improvement of Acoustics.”
There are probably earlier uses in the OED (don’t have acccess where I am right now), but perhaps only other senses.
It’s in Johnson’s Dictionary (maybe spelled with a k).
It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht, the nicht.
bertil,
excellent, thank you very much! I only saw the movie, haven’t had the opportunity to read Roelfzema’s book, so that was pure conjecture on my part.
MMcM: No, the 1683 quote is the first citation.
“Huh, how about that!” moment from the etymology of acoustic: “The reg. Eng. representative of the Gr. would be acustic.” Why, so it would! (We got the -ou- from French.)
Something weird is going on.
Both TLF (hope that link works) and Wikipedia claim that Joseph Sauveur coined the word acoustique in French in 1700, twenty years after Marsh. So it cannot be directly from the French.
The OED quote for acoustic from 1605 is Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, 135:
What I find online for what I think is the right section in the 1605 Bacon in Google Books:
And then 1623 expanded and Latinized:
The quote looks like a translation of that.
The only place I find the quote itself is Basil Montagu from 1849, with slightly different spelling and surrounding quotation marks.
It’s hard to say anything definitive, given that there’s a frustrating snippet view involved and multiple older editions that aren’t scanned. The next line after the snippet occurs in some full view works by Montagu and Taylor, but without that one line.
Maybe the neologism was in Latin, in France or à la mode, thence into English and French.
*mind spins*
I wonder if anyone’s investigated this?
Anybody got access to PPCEME or EEBO?
MMcM,
apparently I have access to EEBO. What is your pleasure?
In Bacon’s The twoo bookes of the proficience and advancement of learning 1605, which maybe is the second link above or maybe some URL in the description in the first link (sorry I can’t be specific, I get a login screen), look for
sub lumine is probably enough. What is the next line?
What we’ve got in Google Books looks to be Modern English, not Early Modern English, so the question is what other mucking about was done.
More generally (dunno how powerful the searching is), does Bacon actually use the word acoustic (acoustique / acoustick / etc.) in his works? Does anyone before 1683?
OK, got it: EEBO, First Book, sheet no. 22 (image 69 of 170). The text is not perfectly readable here, but seems to be identical with the version on Google books:
Are not the Organs of the sences of one kinde with the Organs of Reflection, the Eye with a glasse, the Eare with a Caue or Straight determined and bounded?
Of all the spelling variants I could think of and the system could come up with, I only got 7 hits in 6 records for “acoustick”. None of them in a work by Bacon.
The earliest match:
Author: Charleton, Walter, 1619-1707.
Title: Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, A fabrick of science natural, upon the hypothesis of atoms founded by Epicurus repaired [by] Petrus Gassendus ; augmented [by] Walter Charleton …
Date: 1654
The full list of matches is here.
Huh, weird. Second search for “acoustick” revealed an earlier match, 1635, in a work entitled “Speculum mundi· Or A glasse representing the face of the world …” by John Swan:
Fantastic. Thank you very much.
It looks to me like the 1605 quotation supposedly from The Advancement of Learning is actually from an early English translation of De Augmentis Scientiarum. This is a complicated time because it’s just when scientists began to be able to write in English instead of Latin while still being taken seriously.
Two things stand out for me in the list you kindly copied.
First, the earliest one. John Swan’s Speculum mundi is online here as a bunch of PDFs. The one we want is the last; it’s on page 498 (page 7 left of the PDF), in the The eares section.
Second, Thomas Blount’s Glossographia Anglicana Nova, because it’s a dictionary. Except when being perverse, dictionaries collect words that other people are already using. It says,
This is the second of Johnson’s definitions
and likewise of the OED’s. Perhaps it was the earlier sense.
MMcM,
my pleasure :o)
I do like your hypothesis, so the next step would be checking “De Augmentis Scientiarum”.
And here we go:
The word “obici” puzzles me a bit (a derivation of “obicio”, perhaps, but it looks like a noun…), nevertheless, you are apparently dead on.
As a byproduct of the search, I stumbled across “acousticon”. OED’s first citation is from 1900 (Dorland, W. A. Newman: The illustrated medical dictionary 1901 (ed. 2), 1903 (ed. 3), 1913 (ed. 7)), the earliest hit I got at EEBO was from 1684, in a pamphlet entitled “A third dialogue between the Pope and a phanatick, concerning affairs in England”:
That could be connected to the medicines to aid the hearing. Not to mention that it’s an interesting find in itself :o)
It certainly is — it’s not given to many to produce an antedate of over two centuries! You must let them know at once.
Going up a few comments, maybe because I always sit in the cheap seats, I absolutely hate the Royal Albert Hall’s acoustics. It’s like listening to a cheap radio in a particularly echoey bathtub.
Shibboleths were very important in 19th century Taiwan.
Not sure where else to put this (there are several posts about shibboleths), but here’s a possibly new one from a recent article:
https://newlinesmag.com/first-person/mother-tongue-the-story-of-a-ukrainian-language-convert/
I see that the word shows up here:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Shibboleths#Ukrainian
Someone tangentally, the Wikt entry on “shibboleth” itself says:
[bolding mine] The “stream/torrent” translation for “shibboleth” given is new to me. There are references given in the WikiP article on the topic.
I’ve always thought that ‘stream’ was probably the right translation: it would be more likely to come to mind while guarding a ford of the Jordan than ‘ear of wheat’.
ObMeta: While composing the previous sentence, I found myself blanking on the correct preposition to use with the noun ford. Ford over came to mind first, but besides being semantic nonsense, it was obviously contamination from bridge over. I finally had to consult the OED’s citations to determine that ford of is the idiomatic construction, and I still feel a little funny about it. This may be because the verb ford is transitive, so there is no preposition associated with it.
My intuition said ‘ford across‘, which Google ngrams says is only a little less common
There really isn’t any conclusive argument that I’ve read as to which meaning was intended. Since these are and were homophones, the question seems to be moot.
There are occurrences of the singular form of the word, both as ‘ear of grain’ and ‘torrent’.
I find the plural “fords of” feels more natural than “ford of.” However, this might just be the influence of Prince Caspian, which was probably where I learned the literal meaning of ford; like mustang, American children are more likely to learn it as a brand name nowadays, before learning the original (rural) meaning of the term. (I think the Fords of Beruna were first* mentioned in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but only in the sequel did their nature as the place of a river crossing become significant.) Moreover, I don’t really have any pragmatic understanding of how large a fording area needs to be to qualify for the plural fords.
* The issuing of more recent editions of The Chronicles of Narnia in chronological order is, of course, an atrocity.
I find the plural “fords of” feels more natural than “ford of.”
Indeed, it appears in the plural in Judges 3:28 (““Follow me,” he ordered, “for the Lord has given Moab, your enemy, into your hands.” So they followed him down and took possession of the fords of the Jordan that led to Moab; they allowed no one to cross over”) and 12:5-6 (“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,” hey 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”). But I take that to refer to more than one crossing, rather than a single crossing expressed as a plurale tantum.
https://dragaera.fandom.com/wiki/Bengloarafurd
The river that the ford is to, or through, is called the Climbing River.
https://bryann.net/dragaera/map/Castle_Redface.html
Hebrew Wikipedia has a very interesting discussion of how the Shibboleth incident is translated into various languages that don’t have a phonemic ʃ/s contrast, or even any sibilants at all. To wit,
• Septuagint: καὶ εἶπαν αὐτῷ εἰπὸν δὴ στάχυς καὶ οὐ κατεύθυνεν τοῦ λαλῆσαι οὕτως ‘Then they said to him, Say now Stachys [ear of grain]; and he did not rightly pronounce it so.’ (Brenton translation)
• Modern Greek: Σχίββωλεθ ([ʃx]) vs. Σίββωλεθ ([s]).
• Japanese: シボレテ [ɕiborete] vs. セボレテ [seborete], again exploiting conditioned allophones.
• Icelandic: sjibbólet vs. sibbólet.
• Gilbertese: teiboreta [teipoɾeta] vs. tiboreta [sipoɾeta].
• Maori: hiporete vs. iporete.
None of the Oti-Volta languages distinguishes s/ʃ, so I duly looked at some translations …
The Kusaal BIble just cheats, with shibbolef (sic) versus sibbolef, presumably on the assumption that anybody sophisticated enough to read the Bible at all is familiar with the foreign sound – and spelling – “sh.”
The Mooré Bible makes more of an effort, with sɩbolɛte versus fɩbolɛte and a helpful footnote.
The Ditammari Bible does even better, with sibodɛɛ versus cibodɛɛ.
The Welsh Bible does the same as the Kusaal (shibboleth/sibboleth), though modern Welsh does actually have /ʃ/: it just doesn’t usually spell it that way.
Now I think of it, the Ditammari one would actually work (using cibodɛɛ as the OK one) the next time the Batammariba are faced with a horde of invading Mossi. (I don’t think this has ever actually happened, but there’s no harm in having contingency plans in place.)
[I’ve just discovered that “Batammariba” means “builders” (= Kusaal tammɛɛdib.) One can learn even from Wikipedia.]
The (modern, critical) Stuttgart edition of the Vulgate has sebboleth—tebboleth. The (16th century) Clementine edition has Scibboleth—Sibboleth. Italians.
The Codex Amiatinus has sebboleth and thebboleth (see here).
I have to say, thebboleth is a very funny word.
I’d crack up saying it even if I were trying to save my life at a ford.
Elmer Fudd the Gileadite, gun muzzle pointing at Ephraimite Daffy Duck…
(Ed.: Porky Pig would be more consistent, but Elmer has the necessary murderousness.)
But seriously, thanks, Xerîb. It’s shocking, not to use the word lightly, that the word, written in the absolutely clear uncial of the Amiatinus, is mistranscribed in the Stuttgart edition, as well as the 5th edition of Weber and Gryson’s Biblia Sacra Vulgata, footnoted variants included. This is not an obscure book, and millions have read its printed editions over the last 500 years. Even the Gutenberg Bible has thebboleth.