FEUBOGRSEWYNFSXTW

/one time pads ftw

A'la'ih, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini, a'la'ih, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini, do'neh'lini...

Semper Fi and godspeed Hero.

How?

Article makes me want to go to a casino and have a drink.

His final words were great, but nobody knows what they meant

Mrmmf...

Mr. Potatoass: Article makes me want to go to a casino and have a drink.

Here's 10 beads and a beaver fur. Put it on 10 black for me.

Young Guns 2 was on TV a couple of weeks ago. I was watching and had the closed caption on. When Chavez spoke Navajo, the caption read: [Speaking Foreign Language]


Anyway, RIP Marine

Seriously....why aren't Native American languages taught in school. What the fark do we need French class for, except to fulfill a graduation requirement?

fanbladesaresharp: Seriously....why aren't Native American languages taught in school. What the fark do we need French class for, except to fulfill a graduation requirement?

Outside of anthropology-related fields, there is little academic interest in Native American languages.

fanbladesaresharp: Seriously....why aren't Native American languages taught in school. What the fark do we need French class for, except to fulfill a graduation requirement?

The purpose of language is communication, so to that end languages should be taught in order of how many people you can communicate with (not necessarily as a first language, but at any level). Chinese should definitely be on the list, along with Spanish as the top 2. I'm not sure what would be third or after (though French would probably be on there somewhere, as they had colonies too & it's not an uncommon language in, say, Africa). The Native American languages would be *way* down the list...

/not ideology, just pragmatism

The Navajo Code talkers took part in every US Marine assault conducted in the Pacific between 1942-1945.
To quote Major General Howard Connor,"Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." General Connor alone had 6 Navajo Code talkers working around the clock during the first 48 hours of battle, sending, coding, decoding a total of 800 messages, all with NO ERRORS!

buckler: The Navajo code-talker dictionary. (new window)

That is a book mark
+1 internets to you

Pretty sure that, like Welsh and Hebrew, there are more people today who speak Navajo than did in the 1940s.

jshine: The purpose of language is communication, so to that end languages should be taught in order of how many people you can communicate with (not necessarily as a first language, but at any level).

I hope, one day, you'll understand why that's just dumb.

AnotherOldFart: To quote Major General Howard Connor,"Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." General Connor alone had 6 Navajo Code talkers working around the clock during the first 48 hours of battle, sending, coding, decoding a total of 800 messages, all with NO ERRORS!

It's easy enough to code and decode an message without error when you're working with a language (especially one where both parties have agreed in advance on what certain words specifically mean) than working in code.

The thing that I find mind-blowing is that, while we crack Purple, and the Enigma, and pretty much every other code the Germans and Japanese used during the war. the Japanese were at a complete loss to even deduce that the code-talkers were using a language, much less crack it!

jshine: The purpose of language is communication, so to that end languages should be taught in order of how many people you can communicate with (not necessarily as a first language, but at any level). Chinese should definitely be on the list, along with Spanish as the top 2. I'm not sure what would be third or after (though French would probably be on there somewhere, as they had colonies too & it's not an uncommon language in, say, Africa). The Native American languages would be *way* down the list...

Languages ranked by number of native speakers

And that's not taking into account that English is the default language of international communication (like Greek in the ancient Roman world) and that millions of people speak it as a second language.

Dwight_Yeast: It's easy enough to code and decode an message without error when you're working with a language (especially one where both parties have agreed in advance on what certain words specifically mean) than working in code.

They were using both the language and a code utilizing that language. It wasn't as simple as just speaking Navajo, which is why, even though the Japanese did capture a handful of Navajo they never broke the code.

fanbladesaresharp: Seriously....why aren't Native American languages taught in school.

the fact that this person died 5 days ago and it is just now hitting the main pages should answer your question.

/I hope some TFers can verify that this story was submitted earlier in the week

SoothinglyDeranged: Because you're from Canada, a bilingual country whose national languages are English and French. I guess you missed that day in school, hmm.

/Fellow, disappointed, Canadian

Blessedly, the United States is one of the few countries on the planet without a national language.

"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow"?

Dwight_Yeast: SoothinglyDeranged: Because you're from Canada, a bilingual country whose national languages are English and French. I guess you missed that day in school, hmm.

/Fellow, disappointed, Canadian

Blessedly, the United States is one of the few countries on the planet without a national language.

Qué va!

I have a t-shirt that he signed about 10 years ago. He and a group of these guys were at a little street fair in Page, AZ. Five of them signed my shirt. I gave it to my dad who fought in the Pacific between '43 and '47.

SoothinglyDeranged: fanbladesaresharp: Seriously....why aren't Native American languages taught in school. What the fark do we need French class for, except to fulfill a graduation requirement?

Because you're from Canada, a bilingual country whose national languages are English and French. I guess you missed that day in school, hmm.

/Fellow, disappointed, Canadian

? You missed more than a few days apparently there, Geronimo. I live in California. How did you presume I'm Canadian?

cdharding: I LOLd when I read the literal translation for Spain: "sheep pain"

when I hear sheep pain, I always think Spain.

Wayne 985: fanbladesaresharp: Seriously....why aren't Native American languages taught in school. What the fark do we need French class for, except to fulfill a graduation requirement?

French is one of the UN's six official languages, it's a second official language in Canada, France itself is still an influential nation, and French remains of the one of the primary languages throughout Africa.

Granted, that doesn't mean a lot for your typical American, but they're still more likely to put it to use than they are a Native American tongue that's spoken by a handful of people in some pocket of the American Southwest, where everyone speaks English or Spanish already.

My point being that there are plenty of awesome languages on this planet, but most are almost totally impractical.

Well I only had 3 choices in HS...had to have 4 semesters of either French, Spanish, or German. That was it.

Wayne 985: My point being that there are plenty of awesome languages on this planet, but most are almost totally impractical.

Like the Tuvan language.

Dwight_Yeast: The thing that I find mind-blowing is that, while we crack Purple, and the Enigma, and pretty much every other code the Germans and Japanese used during the war. the Japanese were at a complete loss to even deduce that the code-talkers were using a language, much less crack it!

That's because of all the major combatants, the Japanese were singularly *AWFUL* at signals intelligence and cryptanalysis. Even the Italians were better at it.

You will note that we didn't try to use code-talkers against the Germans, who, while not as good as the UK and the US in SIGINT/Cryptanalysis, were at least fairly competent. That's because we were pretty sure that the Germans would have figured out the code.

The code the Navajo code talkers used wasn't particularly secure, but it was quicker than other methods, and the Japanese just weren't good enough to break it. It's not that the Navajos were that good, it's that the Japanese were that bad.

They don't call themselves Navajo,they're Dine,which means "The People".

themoreyouknow.jpg

The Dine, as soldiers, were often mistaken by the Japanese as being Japanese-Americans. But you still get Mormons believing that these folks still came from the Middle-East and are directly related to semitic peoples, rather than crossing over from Asia.
/not all mormons, mind you, just those that actually toe the "party line".

buckler: The Navajo code-talker dictionary. (new window)

NAMES OF COUNTRIES
AFRICA ZHIN-NI BLACKIES

Racist buggers

cynicalbastard: The Dine, as soldiers, were often mistaken by the Japanese as being Japanese-Americans. But you still get Mormons believing that these folks still came from the Middle-East and are directly related to semitic peoples, rather than crossing over from Asia.
/not all mormons, mind you, just those that actually toe the "party line".

tell the magic skivie people to stufu. or better yet to comune with their golden velocorapter

farking lsd

Dwight_Yeast: It's easy enough to code and decode an message without error when you're working with a language (especially one where both parties have agreed in advance on what certain words specifically mean) than working in code.


Umm... it actually wasn't just the language; it was coded messages IN the language,with code words and phrases worked out systematically and agreed upon by the first group of code talkers enlisted.

Nmissi: Dwight_Yeast: It's easy enough to code and decode an message without error when you're working with a language (especially one where both parties have agreed in advance on what certain words specifically mean) than working in code.


Umm... it actually wasn't just the language; it was coded messages IN the language,with code words and phrases worked out systematically and agreed upon by the first group of code talkers enlisted.

Yes, but a large reason for that is that Navajo didn't have words for things like "tank" and "submarine", so they substituted their words for "tortoise", and a portmanteau of "iron fish" for subs. The code itself is ridiculously insecure from a cryptanalytical standpoint.

The reasons why it worked as well as it did are as follows:

1. The Japanese were bad at exploiting signals intelligence, as I pointed out above.
2. The language itself was obscure.

The Japanese actually *HAD* an opportunity to exploit it, and they blew it: They had captured a native Dine speaker, Joe Kieyoomia. They had him listen to the messages, but when he reported they made no sense to him, they appear to have largely dropped the matter (after torturing him). What they should have done is to said "Just write down what you hear, don't worry if it sounds like gibberish to you." Had they done that (and had Mr. Kieyoomia cooperated), the code itself would have fallen fairly quickly.

Having said that, it might not have mattered that much anyway.

The Navajo codetalkers were only used for short range tactical communications. By their very nature, the usefulness of intercepting and decoding those kinds of messages is very short, on the order of minutes and hours, or at the very most, a couple of days. Because of the nature of the war in the Pacific, it also limited the chances of it being intercepted: The Japanese occupied a large area, but they were widely separated on small islands spread across the western Pacific. For the most part, the only people who could hear the codetalker transmissions were those already under attack. Longer range messages, and messages of strategic importance, were sent by Morse or teleprinter, and were encrypted using much more secure messages.

To give you an idea of how *BAD* the Japanese were at this sort of thing, the messages sent by Arthur Evans, the coast watcher who helped rescue the crew of the PT-109 (including JFK), weren't decoded by the Japanese, despite the fact that they were a relatively simple transposition cipher that would take a competent amateur cryptanalyst at most a couple hours to suss out.

NPR had a radio segment after his death with an archived interview of Mr. Light and he explained how the code worked ("eggs" in Navajo = bombs, "turtle" = tank).

He also said that when he went to school the teachers punished and humiliated Navajo kids for speaking in Navajo among themselves, rather than in English. Kinda convenient when the language came in so darned handy for all the English-speaking Americans later on. [Attitude added on my end, he was very low-key].

Thank you Mr. Little (and the other Navajo codetalkers) for helping keep my uncle and grandfather safe.