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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

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....

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> 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).

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'.

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