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Comment by foobar2020 | Hacker News Reader

foobar2020

Fun fact: during the six-day war the Israeli military command decided to use exclusively Polish in communications, as a cheap and quick method of "encryption". Most commanders could speak Yiddish just as good as Polish. It worked, the Arab coalition intelligence could not understand a word.

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A lot of military commanders of Israel had been educated in Poland in the 1930s, also Poland was the largest supplier of weapons to Israeli groups fighting for an Jewish state. The Polish idea was if Jews had their own state they would leave Poland.

e.g see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Begin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betar

http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac16.htm

My father was a commander in the six-day war, and certainly could not speak Polish. This is the first time I've heard of this notion.

Most anyone raised in Israel would not be able to speak Polish clearly enough to communicate commands, and most commanders (including the chief of staff Rabin) were born in (then) Palestine.

You only need one person in each unit with a radio that speaks Polish for this to work. They can translate for everyone else. Think of the Navaho code talkers the US used in WW2. If there isn't a polish speaker in a unit, then you would have to just use another language and be more careful what you say. It seems like the that the 'lets use Polish' strategy was more a widely used trick than a systematic policy though.

I'm a bit surprised by this; as tricky as the Polish language is to e.g. native English speakers, it shares the same sounds as many Slavic languages, plus a fair amount of vocab and grammar basics.

I mean, even though I'm pretty crappy at Polish - my only Slavic language - even I can understand a surprising amount of Russian.

It just seems a bit weird to me that no-one in the Arab coalition spoke Russian and could work backwards from there.

> I mean, even though I'm pretty crappy at Polish - my only Slavic language - even I can understand a surprising amount of Russian.

As a native speaker of Slovenian, and a passive understander of most southern slavic languages, Russian sounds like people are messing with me. It sounds like I should understand what they're saying, but I really just don't. It sounds familiar and relatable, but it just does not parse outside a few very simple words/phrases. Definitely not enough to even remotely hold a conversation.

It's really quite unnerving.

Same situation as Dutch, I guess. It's so close to a mix between English and German (I'm goot with English, was forced into 4 years of German in high school) that reading/hearing it sounds like I should be able to understand, but it just does not parse.

I hate that feeling.

Definitely can relate. Dutch to me is like - oh, they speak German. No, I don't understand. Ah, it's Danish. No, I don't understand. Gahh!! It also sounds like English, but not really. So I conclude it must be Dutch.

It kinda reminds me of holidaying in India - lots of English speakers, and for the majority I'd be fine understanding them (as a native English speaker), but occasionally would stumble.

My wife's sister was there with us, and her English wasn't so great - and yet she understood everyone.

It kinda seems like if you're still learning a language, you know the pitfalls to expect and understand unexpected pronunciations that bit easier.

I have definitely noticed that the more time I spend in the US, the worse I am at understanding bad English.

More infuriatingly, I have started making their/there/they're mistakes. I always thought native speakers were just dumb, but damn it, they really do sound exactly the same.

Hmm, you know when people say that it's when you start dreaming in a foreign language that you can tell you've started getting there with it? Maybe struggling with bad language use is also a sign?

Fun times with their/there/they're: even if you know you're using the correct one in your head, you can't guarantee that your fingers' muscle memory won't get in the way.

After a particularly exhausting week working with MySQL, I lost the ability to type the word "myself." As soon as I start typing "my", the fingers take over and quickly spit out "mysql".

It's infuriating!

If you want to feel really confused, visit Portugal.

The soft consonant formations in Portuguese sound bizarrely similar to those in Russian, but grammatically the language has more in common with Italian.

The same thing happens with romanian. It sounds a little like russian with italian, french and latin words but the grammar is latin/italian. youtube.com/watch?v=dGK40ykalTw

I am a fluent Russian speaker and Bulgarian does that to me. It actually makes me feel strangely disoriented.

This is interesting. As a Polish native speaker I can understand quite well other western Slavic languages (Czech and Slovakian) and I'm not bad with southern Slavic stuff (Croatian etc). But Ukrainian or Russian is quite hard, maybe a word here and there (often with different meaning!).

Hah, I always think that Ukrainian is just like Polish, albeit spoken with an Italian accent.

(although I know there are plenty of false friends between the two!)

Well, not to me it isn't (native Polish speaker)... Yes I can sort of, kind of, figure out what they're saying, but it's probably 50-60% plus some intelligent "cheating" if the context is clear

Belarussian is fairly easy, too - not as close as Slovakian, but somewhat more similar than Russian or Ukrainian. It's rarely heard though, as most of Belarus speaks Russian, especially in cities.

Wouldn't Yiddish have worked just the same though? Did Arab coalition intelligence speak German or Yiddish?

I guess they would have hired people speaking Yiddish.

My grandpa always told me to learn Russian and German cause you have to speak the enemy's language ;)

Within family we tend to joke that my brother will be protecting us during the next German invasion - he has blond hair and blue eyes, and generally looks Aryan. Oh, and he speaks German too :).

(I, on the other hand, have been tasked to save the family in case of Islam taking over - if I don't shave for a month, I look like a stereotypical Arab :).)

Would hiring Polish speakers be more difficult?

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't google up anything. Majority of israelis don't come from Europe, so I doubt this would work now. It seems probable that new olim mizrahim didn't yet make it to the high ranks yet, but I really doubt that it would work among low-ranked officers and soldiers.

I admit, it looks like it's quite hard to find many sources for this information. To the point I started to doubt it. I was basing on this article (in Polish), translation:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...

Thanks! I wonder what was the original source for that, thiugh. A lot of individual yiddish words made it into hebrew and israeli culture; I presume a lot of them have polish origins. May be that lead arab countries to believe that israelis were speaking polish?

> Majority of israelis don't come from Europe, so I doubt this would work now.

Do you have any sources on that? I was under the impression that they actually do.

Edit: I've found some stats. According to wikipedia, 61% of Israeli Jews came from Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah

Just to elaborate they didn't send communications in Polish/Yiddish they used polish as code words similarly to WW2 era windtalkers.

I would assume mainly because the polish word for a tank is still a tank ;)

It was also not a high command decision it was something that only a few armored brigades toyed with....

Polish word for tank is "czołg".

Really that's odd, it's tank in pretty much most languages even slavik ones (Russian, Bulgarian, Ukranian, Romanian (yes i know this one is a Romance one) etc..) Is czołg actually used commonly?

Yup, noone uses "tank" unless trying to sound Russian (and most people know it's Russian for czołg because of this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czterej_pancerni_i_pies).

Also in multiplayer games tank is used for the fighter class that is supposed to absorb the damage, and the verb is "tankować", but it's not associated with czołg in most people minds (at least not in mine), it's just another English word from games, like pwn or imba.

It is.

Yes, czołg is used exclusively for tank in Poland. It comes from verb "czołgać", which means "to crawl"

> Really that's odd, it's tank in pretty much most languages even slavik ones [...]

What about Panzer?

A quick scan of the Wikipedia same-article-in-other-languages links on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer shows that it's indeed some variation of tank in a lot of languages. The other common themes is some vernacular variation of `armored car'.

> I would assume mainly because the polish word for a tank is still a tank ;)

The word is actually 'czołg'.

My assumption is that Polish was used because a significant part of Israeli Jews came to Israel from Poland (or former Polish territories grabbed by USSR after WW II), so they were familiar with the language.

By 67 most Jews in Israel of Polish decent would've been 3rd and 2nd generation those who weren't would be holocaust survivors which were exempt from any type of military service. Euro-Aemrican Jews make up less than a 3rd of the current Jewish population of Israel while Polish Jews were quite a significant part of the early Jewish immigration (late 1800's to 1920-30's till the Brits closed off Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine) there weren't a significant portion afterwards as not that many were left after WW2 (out of about 3M polish Jews only 100,000 survived in Poland after the war with about 150,000 more who've managed to escape eastwards, under the communist rule they weren't allowed to leave, in the 50's the USSR permitted about 30,000 Jews to immigrate to Israel but from then until 1989 pretty much no one could leave).

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