Shibboleth

Shibboleth ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Marc Redfield

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The word thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. It is therefore useful to examine closely the inherited meaning of shibboleth as test-word. A relatively rare word, it figures powerfully at a crucial moment in William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and above all in poems by Paul Celan and in Jacques Derrida’s study of Celan. Subsequent chapters will read these texts carefully, together with the Biblical narrative.

Author(s):  
Marc Redfield

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. Building on Jacques Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, but following its own itinerary, this book interprets the episode in Judges together with texts by Celan, passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern, pursuing the track of a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers Celan a locus of poetico-political affirmation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Carlos Ferreira

This book seeks to read the narrative in Mark 4.35-41, focusing on the character of the individuals in order to understand their behavior when facing a dangerous situation in the storm at sea they ask Jesus, “Master, do you not care that we are perishing?” When facing danger, the prevalent emotions are fear, despair and anxiety. Therefore, the exegetical study will be conducted using psychology, a science that studies human behavior and mental processes. Based on the theoretical principles of Bible study as literature, the goal of the present study is to perform an exegetical analysis of the biblical narrative in Mark. The miracle description includes all issues related found in manuals and biblical commentaries with their multivisions. It also includes a parenetic, coeval analysis of the text based on the sciences of human behavior aimed at updating and application in modern life. Therefore, the text exegesis sheds light on the history, the validity of the pericope and update for modern life based on psychology. It applies to the study in question the historical-critical method over the structuralist and fundamentalist.


1991 ◽  
Vol 36 (10) ◽  
pp. 907-907
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated
Keyword(s):  

1951 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-85
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 79-131
Author(s):  
Nicole Nau

This article explores semantic and grammatical properties of Latvian agent nouns that are derived from verbs by the suffix -ēj- (for primary verbs) or -tāj- (for secondary verbs). These formations show several peculiarities that distinguish them from agent nouns in other European languages and from similar Latvian nouns formed by other means. They are specialized in meaning, highly regular and transparent. They show verbal features such as aspectuality and combinability with adverbs, and they may inherit verbal arguments. The productivity of the formation is almost unlimited, and many ad hoc formations are found in colloquial style, for example in social media. In discourse, agent nouns often have a referential function, either as the only function or in combination with a concept-building function. The focus of the article is on less institutionalized tokens which show the potential of this morphological process that challenges traditional views about the functions of derivation or its delimitation.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Ralli

This paper deals with [V V] dvandva compounds, which are frequently used in East and Southeast Asian languages but also in Greek and its dialects: Greek is in this respect uncommon among Indo-European languages. It examines the appearance of this type of compounding in Greek by tracing its development in the late Medieval period, and detects a high rate of productivity in most Modern Greek dialects. It argues that the emergence of the [V V] dvandva pattern is not due to areal pressure or to a language-contact situation, but it is induced by a language internal change. It associates this change with the rise of productivity of compounding in general, and the expansion of verbal compounds in particular. It also suggests that the change contributes to making the compound-formation patterns of the language more uniform and systematic. Claims and proposals are illustrated with data from Standard Modern Greek and its dialects. It is shown that dialectal evidence is crucial for the study of the rise and productivity of [V V] dvandva compounds, since changes are not usually portrayed in the standard language.


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