[Multilingual Monday] Shibboleth

[aadroma]

Ah, a concept that I understood but whose name I didn't know: the shibboleth (<- that's a Wikipedia link there!)

This initially came up while seeing the terrible Eytan Fox movie The Bubble, where a Palestinian man tries to pass as Israeli (because he's banging a man in the IDF). At one point the said IDF man he's banging asks why he doesn't "

Comments

[danthered]

Aw, heck, front trill's easy; all you have to do is imitate an idling diesel engine, then add vocalisation! ;o)

Me, when I first took up French I tended to gag on the glottal Parisian "R".

[aadroma]

Hahah, it's the REVERSE for me. My mother spoke fluent Israeli Hebrew and used the Hebrew (uvular) R all the time, so I could imitate that fairly well. The front trill? Not so much.

[bearquest]

But in modern Hebrew a front trill is often heard in some dialects, no? Do you go for the Parisian "r" instead when enunciating words like ראש?

[aadroma]

But it usually identifies you as Sephardic ... or Russian.

[bluebear2]

I had the opposite problem when I learned French. I spent a lot of effort training my mouth to make the sounds accurately that when I did speak it, it was assumed that I was much better at French than I was and they would go off talking very quickly and with words I didn't know.

The trick is to listen to radio (Podcasts are good) with headphones in the dark and mimic what you hear. Don't worry about understanding it, just take syllables and mimmic exactly. That way your mouth gets trained in making the sounds.

[aadroma]

Some sounds escape me (the front trill, an Arabic 3ayn) ... but I'm a persistent fuck!