chancerobinson said:
Why might the Ephraimites have been of a different tongue? (After all they were one of the twelve tribes of Israel)
Here is my answer. Sorry about the length.
It is a curious instance of dialectic difference of pronunciation between the East and West Jordanic tribes. There is evidence that the sound "sh" passed into the Hebrew from the East of Jordan, possibly from the Arabians, with whom the sound is common. The West Jordanic tribes did not get this influence.
Judges 12:5-6 says "And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand."
The Trinity Foundation has a piece on linguistics and the Bible at
http://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=230 the following discusses the reason for the difference in the "s" and "sh" sounds: "The ability to speak and write is assumed from Genesis 1, but information about the analysis of sound occurs explicitly in Scripture; Judges 12 is an example of this. It is clearly indicated that "s" and "sh" indicate different sounds; if they did not, there would be no basis for the discrimination that clearly follows from the difference. The study of different sounds is called "phonetics." The difference between "s" and "sh" lies in where the tongue is placed in proximity to the roof of the mouth to make the sounds - toward the alveolar ridge for "s" and just throat-ward of the alveolar ridge for "sh." The Ephraimites could have been taught to pull their tongues back a short way in their mouths - the place of articulation is the only difference between the sounds. They are both sibilants (hissing sounds) and both unvoiced (without vibration in the vocal cords). This text also leads into phonology, which is the study of how languages treat the sounds that they have. "Shibboleth" and "sibboleth" are the same word. The narrator in this text says that the Ephraimites were pronouncing "Shibboleth" incorrectly, not that they were saying a different word; in linguistic terms, the "s" and "sh" are allophonic, not phonemic, for the Gileadites and Ephraimites. In English, "s" and "sh" alone are enough to make different words: "Sip" and "ship," for example - they are phonemic sounds in English. In the language of Gilead/Ephraim, the sounds were recognizably different but did not make different words. An example of non-phonemic sound difference in English is the various sounds that we spell with "t." The sounds indicated by "t" in the words "tack," "stop," "liter," and "cat" are all different sounds. If someone uses the sound of the "t" sound in "tack" in the word "liter," English speakers will not get a different word (they will still understand the word "liter"), but they will suspect that the speaker is not a native speaker of English. These kinds of differences in sound, even though indicated with the same letter, are often difficult for people to learn in other languages."