[Cryptography] National Navajo Code Talkers Day

Sidney Markowitz sidney at sidney.com
Mon Aug 14 20:36:30 EDT 2017


Jerry Leichter wrote on 14/08/17 10:08 PM:
> 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".  :-)

Tracking this down I actually found a bit of cryptographic relevance :)

The short answer is that they didn't have a word for shark, they did have a
word for "fish" and various adjectives that could be used if they had a
concept regarding fish to express, and their ancestors migrated from British
Columbia by way of other places that had water and fish.

First, the cryptography part:

One reference I found from a Google Books search into "Secret History: The
Story of Cryptology"
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=EBkEGAOlCDsC&lpg=PA315&dq=navajo%20word%20for%20shark&pg=PA313#v=onepage&q=navajo%20word%20for%20shark&f=false

It describes the Navajo code talking as not a simple matter of native Navajo
speakers conversing in their language. It was a cipher that used Navajo words
to encode the English alphabet. For example, the letter C was a Navajo word
for "cow" rotated with two other words that translated to English words that
begin with "c". Similarly, A was a word for "ant" rotated with two other
words. To shorten the messages, a number of designated plaintext words were
represented by Navajo words. Three of those words I saw listed charts were
[battleship - lo-tso - whale], [destroyer - ca-lo - shark], [submarine -
besh-lo - iron fish]

However, according to that reference the code words were made up by the code
talkers for use among themselves and were not necessarily the common native
speaker words for anything. I noticed that an online Navajo English dictionary
(which I do not claim be authoritative) has this for "shark"
https://glosbe.com/en/nv/shark containing two different Navajo entries

łóóʼ hashkéhé

ca-lo

Elsewhere I saw it mentioned that the first one literally means "angry fish".

Thus, "ca-lo" is [some adjective] - fish, not even properly phonetically
transcribed and not necessarily how a native Navajo speaker would refer to a
shark.

Some other discussions I found pointed out that even a native Navajo speaker
who was not trained in the code talking would not understand the messages as
more than a meaningless sequence of nouns. The language contains phonemes that
would be difficult for a non-native speaker to distinguish, especially true
for the Japanese, making it difficult for the messages to be transcribed for
cryptanalysis.

And finally,

https://gamblershouse.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/why-dont-navajos-eat-fish/

An interesting history with quotes from a 19th century anthropologists, which
includes the comment "He notes that Navajo basically has only one word for
'fish': łóó’, a generic term referring to all fish".

-----------------
Sidney Markowitz
http://sidney.com


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