[Cryptography] National Navajo Code Talkers Day

[Ron Garret]

On Aug 14, 2017, at 3:08 AM, Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:

>> Today is National Navajo Code Talkers Day; it was used for crypto comms in WW-2, as only a few tribes could speak it.  There were no words for modern objects, so "shark" was used for "destroyer" etc,
> One wonders why Navaho, at the time an isolated language spoken by a group of people living in a desert hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, would have a word for "shark".  :-)

And how was it determined that this word means “shark”?

rg