8 ms·

How Much Polish Is There in Yiddish (and How Much Yidddish Is There in Polish)?

52 points by stared 11y ago

foobar2020 11y ago
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.
- fishnchips 11y ago
  Wouldn't Yiddish have worked just the same though? Did Arab coalition intelligence speak German or Yiddish?
  - ajuc 11y ago
    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 ;)
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      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 :).)
    - fishnchips 11y ago
      Would hiring Polish speakers be more difficult?
- golergka 11y ago
  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.
  - foobar2020 11y ago
    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=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.miastowroclaw.pl%2Findex.php%2Fhis%2Fitem%2F4555-polski-kod-zwycięstwa&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...
    - golergka 11y ago
      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?
  - lgieron 11y ago
    > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah
- _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
  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/Menachem_Begin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betar http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac16.htm http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac16.htm
- mootothemax 11y ago
  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.
  - Swizec 11y ago
    > 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.
    - jacobush 11y ago
      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.
    - mootothemax 11y ago
      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.
- calanya 11y ago
  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.
  - simonh 11y ago
    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.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  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....
  - duhast 11y ago
    Polish word for tank is "czołg".
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      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?
      - ajuc 11y ago
        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 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.
      - elcct 11y ago
        It is.
      - bjakubski 11y ago
        Yes, czołg is used exclusively for tank in Poland. It comes from verb "czołgać", which means "to crawl"
      - eru 11y ago
        > 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 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'.
ars 11y ago
Very cool article, but I have to object to this sentence at the start: "Nowadays it is rarely spoken" The number of Yiddish speakers is actually growing, not shrinking and growing at a very rapid rate. It's the mother language (first language) of many many people, with either English or Hebrew as the second.
- golergka 11y ago
  > It's the mother language (first language) of many many people, with either English or Hebrew as the second. They are usually ultra-orthodox though.
  - ars 11y ago
    > They are usually ultra-orthodox though. And? Does that mean they are not people? I'm not sure what you are trying to say, or was that just badly worded?
mitchtbaum 11y ago
I searched for "yiddish revival", since I miss my elders who would speak it around me, as well as their expressions and stories (..gone are those days when I could get a potchka on the tuchus and occasionally some gelt :), and I found that it's far from dying: http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/yiddish-revival/ http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/yiddish-revival/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/11/yiddish-revival_n_3734046.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/11/yiddish-revival_n_3... http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/gevalt-u-s-college-students-lead-surprise-yiddish-revival-1.402786 http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/gevalt-u-s-college-students-le... https://yivo.org/down-with-the-revival-yiddish-is-a-living-language https://yivo.org/down-with-the-revival-yiddish-is-a-living-l... ... What a mazel! I look forward to joining in and listening to some good klezmer music till then.
ajuc 11y ago
Another example of Yiddish influencing modern Polish (with almost no Yiddish speakers in Poland) is using "mamełe/tatełe" to refer to parents (on purpose, to sound funny and endearing, same thing as "pieseł"). It's not very common but some people do it.
- pimpl 11y ago
  I’d never consider it Yiddish influence to be honest.
  - ajuc 11y ago
    well, it is.
- anon4 11y ago
  Similarly, the parents refer to their children as "perkele". Yes, I know it's a Finnish word, but it seems to be well-known..
- V-2 11y ago
  Not to say it's not true, but I've never ever come across these people who do it. Could it be a regional thing?
  - ajuc 11y ago
    I've mostly seen it on wykop.pl (a website, it's like reddit had kids with 4chan). Here some people try to trace it: http://www.wykop.pl/wpis/6202818/kto-mowi-do-swojej-mamy-mamele-przez-wypok-i-powie/ http://www.wykop.pl/wpis/6202818/kto-mowi-do-swojej-mamy-mam...
    - V-2 11y ago
      Now this explains a lot; like many major forum sites, Wykop tends to develop its own exclusive microculture, slang, wordplays etc. and it's not representative of everyday language, such as calling women "pink" for example, who does that in real life. A few commenters in the link you pasted actually recognize this figure of speech as sort of a local meme. Still an interesting phenomenon I agree, although probably temporary and of limited scope.
pliptvo 11y ago
I make Yiddish keyboard maps for OSX, GNU/Linux and Windows. http://www.shretl.org http://www.shretl.org Since moving to GNU/Linux I could really do with a hand maintaining the Windows and OSX branches. Anyone interested? Also - anyone have contacts at Microsoft or Apple who might be able to help get a Yiddish keyboard map installed per default in their OSs?
V-2 11y ago
Curiously enough, Yiddish affected Polish crime slang, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grypsera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grypsera - for starters, the subculture of syndicated prisoners is known as "git people", git being Yiddish for good, ok, etc.

52 points by stared 11y ago

foobar2020 11y ago

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.

fishnchips 11y ago
Wouldn't Yiddish have worked just the same though? Did Arab coalition intelligence speak German or Yiddish?
- ajuc 11y ago
  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 ;)
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    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 :).)
  - fishnchips 11y ago
    Would hiring Polish speakers be more difficult?
golergka 11y ago
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.
- foobar2020 11y ago
  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=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.miastowroclaw.pl%2Findex.php%2Fhis%2Fitem%2F4555-polski-kod-zwycięstwa&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...
  - golergka 11y ago
    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?
- lgieron 11y ago
  > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah
_Codemonkeyism 11y ago
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/Menachem_Begin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betar http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac16.htm http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac16.htm
mootothemax 11y ago
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.
- Swizec 11y ago
  > 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.
  - jacobush 11y ago
    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.
  - mootothemax 11y ago
    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.
calanya 11y ago
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.
- simonh 11y ago
  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.
dogma1138 11y ago
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....
- duhast 11y ago
  Polish word for tank is "czołg".
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    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?
    - ajuc 11y ago
      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 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.
    - elcct 11y ago
      It is.
    - bjakubski 11y ago
      Yes, czołg is used exclusively for tank in Poland. It comes from verb "czołgać", which means "to crawl"
    - eru 11y ago
      > 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 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'.

ars 11y ago

Very cool article, but I have to object to this sentence at the start: "Nowadays it is rarely spoken" The number of Yiddish speakers is actually growing, not shrinking and growing at a very rapid rate. It's the mother language (first language) of many many people, with either English or Hebrew as the second.

golergka 11y ago
> It's the mother language (first language) of many many people, with either English or Hebrew as the second. They are usually ultra-orthodox though.
- ars 11y ago
  > They are usually ultra-orthodox though. And? Does that mean they are not people? I'm not sure what you are trying to say, or was that just badly worded?

mitchtbaum 11y ago

I searched for "yiddish revival", since I miss my elders who would speak it around me, as well as their expressions and stories (..gone are those days when I could get a potchka on the tuchus and occasionally some gelt :), and I found that it's far from dying: http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/yiddish-revival/ http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/yiddish-revival/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/11/yiddish-revival_n_3734046.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/11/yiddish-revival_n_3... http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/gevalt-u-s-college-students-lead-surprise-yiddish-revival-1.402786 http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/gevalt-u-s-college-students-le... https://yivo.org/down-with-the-revival-yiddish-is-a-living-language https://yivo.org/down-with-the-revival-yiddish-is-a-living-l... ... What a mazel! I look forward to joining in and listening to some good klezmer music till then.

ajuc 11y ago

Another example of Yiddish influencing modern Polish (with almost no Yiddish speakers in Poland) is using "mamełe/tatełe" to refer to parents (on purpose, to sound funny and endearing, same thing as "pieseł"). It's not very common but some people do it.

pimpl 11y ago
I’d never consider it Yiddish influence to be honest.
- ajuc 11y ago
  well, it is.
anon4 11y ago
Similarly, the parents refer to their children as "perkele". Yes, I know it's a Finnish word, but it seems to be well-known..
V-2 11y ago
Not to say it's not true, but I've never ever come across these people who do it. Could it be a regional thing?
- ajuc 11y ago
  I've mostly seen it on wykop.pl (a website, it's like reddit had kids with 4chan). Here some people try to trace it: http://www.wykop.pl/wpis/6202818/kto-mowi-do-swojej-mamy-mamele-przez-wypok-i-powie/ http://www.wykop.pl/wpis/6202818/kto-mowi-do-swojej-mamy-mam...
  - V-2 11y ago
    Now this explains a lot; like many major forum sites, Wykop tends to develop its own exclusive microculture, slang, wordplays etc. and it's not representative of everyday language, such as calling women "pink" for example, who does that in real life. A few commenters in the link you pasted actually recognize this figure of speech as sort of a local meme. Still an interesting phenomenon I agree, although probably temporary and of limited scope.

pliptvo 11y ago

I make Yiddish keyboard maps for OSX, GNU/Linux and Windows. http://www.shretl.org http://www.shretl.org Since moving to GNU/Linux I could really do with a hand maintaining the Windows and OSX branches. Anyone interested? Also - anyone have contacts at Microsoft or Apple who might be able to help get a Yiddish keyboard map installed per default in their OSs?

V-2 11y ago

Curiously enough, Yiddish affected Polish crime slang, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grypsera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grypsera - for starters, the subculture of syndicated prisoners is known as "git people", git being Yiddish for good, ok, etc.