Do you know any interesting shibboleths?

15 comments

1. We’ve got a few between Bohemians and Moravians regarding differences of sound assimilation in “kv” and “sh” clusters. For example the word *kvůli* (because of) is pronounced as [kvu:li] in Bohemia but [gvu:li] in Moravia.

2. The Dutch used Scheveningse kacheltjes during WW2. The Germans couldn’t pronounce it right. It means little heaters from Scheveningen (place on the coast in South Holland near the Hague.)

3. Involuntarily done, but will immediately identify a Galician elsewhere in Spain (or wherever they are known) is:

   * never, ever answer “yes” or “no”. Usually “it depends” + statement, usually withe the next rule.
   * always, even life or death situations, answer a question with another question.

   I can tell you I drove my Germanic co-workers to desperation.

4. A Swedish shibboleth with the the somewhat unique Swedish [sj sound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj-sound) /ɧ/. Also contains the somewhat unusual /øː/ and /ʉː/ sounds.

   > Sju sjösjuka sjömän sköttes av sju sköna sjuksköterskor.

   (Seven sea-sick seamen was tended to by seven beautiful nurses).

   There are many variants, but they all start with “sju sjösjuka sjömän…”.

5. It’s pretty grim and frankly rather immoral, but during the Finnish civil war in 1918 the White Guard would ask red prisoners of war to say the word *yksi*, which is the number “one” in Finnish. The vowel *y* is rather difficult to pronounce for native Russian speakers and a Russian accent is particularly noticeable when it comes to that sound.

   So if the prisoner said the word in a Russian accent they’d be shot pretty much on the spot, and if it was a Finnish person they’d be taking to a prison camp and maybe shot later.

6. >Germans use thumb, index, and middle finger whereas people of UK/USA: index, thumb and ring finger.

   Literally every other country uses the index, thumb and ring finger. It’s not just the UK and USA.

   Thumb, index, and middle finger is an exclusively german (maybe also austrian/swiss) thing.

7. There is a very common shibboleth in the Catalan language ”Setze judges d’un jutjat mengen fetge d’un penjat” that translates to something like “sixteen judges of a court eat liver of a hanged man”. Yep, very colourful

8. A Dane once tried to teach me how to say ___Rødgrød med fløde___, but even with specific instructions I couldn’t do it.

9. In the UK in the 1950s motorcycle policing units were formed in London, and they quickly got the derogatory nickname ‘black rats’ due to their long coat tails looking like rat tails.

   The officers of the squad latched onto this, and used the logo of the black rat on their off duty motorcycles, as a way to give a silent indication that they were an officer if stopped (actually saying it could be deemed corruption).

   By the 1990s it appears much of the countries police were doing the same, and by the 2000s the secret was well and truly out, with national magazines for car and bike enthusiasts giving away stickers to their readers to give them the same level of protection from the police off duty officers received.

10. In Northern Ireland, it is common that Protestants pronounce ‘H’ as “aitch” and Catholics pronounce it as “haitch”.

11. >index, thumb and ring finger

    Are you sure you don’t mean index, middle, and ring finger? Because trying to display my index, thumb, and ring finger while holding my pinky and middle finger down is literally impossible for me. Like how do you even keep your ring finger straight out if you’re keeping your pinky and middle finger down?

12. Foreigners ignoring our Umlaute. Volkerball is wrong. Or putting Röck Döts where they don’t belong and the wonder that Germans pronounce them.

    Then there are our grammatical genders and the articles. For example the word *Band* can be male, female or neuter and foreigners often don’t get it right. But for some words there are regional differences. For example Nutella or Cola. Cola is neuter in southern Germany and Austria but feminine in central and northern Germany.

    Then we have our German dialects and their different pronunciation rules.

    Austrians stress Mathematik different than Germans, Swiss German doesn’t use ß, even in Fußball.

    Foreigners also have problems to pronounce certain sounds, Russians and French struggle with our H, English speakers with Ch. They cannot pronounce *tschechisches Streichholzschächtelchen*.

    One that currently pisses me of are journalists who use the English transliteration rules for Russian or Ukrainian, because they don’t know the German rules.

    And Germans pronounce Scheveningen wrong.

13. In Flanders, we had “schild en vriend”.

    During the Guldensporenslag in 1302, when the county of Flanders fought for independence from the French, everyone was forced to say it. That way the French nobles could be identified, because they couldn’t pronounce it. They’d be killed.

    Sadly, this phrase was basically ‘hijacked’ by far right extremists.

14. In Rotterdam, the Netherlands, they sing “komen wij uit Rotterdam?” (Translation: are we from Rotterdam?) And the andwer is “ken je dat niet horen dan?” (Cant you hear that) in the Rotterdam accent. It is used to distinguish Rotterdammers from other dutch people

15. it’s narrated that during the *Vespri Siciliani* uprising of 1252, when the Sicilian expelled the Angevin, the rebels would ask people to name chickpeas (*cìciri* in Sicilian) – the French pronunciation /ʃi:ʃiri/ ( /ʃ/ as in “shawl”) instead of /tʃi:tʃiri/ (/tʃ/ as in “chalk”) would gain the unlucky french speaker a blade to the gut in no time.