I had always just believed it was because they were isolated, but I’d been thinking about it lately and that just doesn’t hold up. Can someone familiar with code breaking and encryption help me understand why they were nearly impossible to understand, while almost every other cipher was eventually cracked? Thank you!
In: Mathematics
This makes me wonder what language the government has created/dug up and kept secret in order to win the next war (which hopefully doesn’t come).
I belive it came down to a language barrier. Patterns and knowing a language help break codes. Even if they decoded it they probably wouldnt know what it was saying or know of it was right
One of the biggest reasons it was indecipherable was that the speakers used idomatic language and the fact that few outside the Navajo nation can actually speak it fluently. It is a difficult language that grew up in a very isolated location
One thing to keep in mind is that they were mostly used tactically, where the value of deciphering drops by the hour
Hence the ease with which a natural speaker can transmit a message (without relying on machines or tables) made them very valuable.
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Right, it wasn’t well known. A non-speaker of any language is going to have difficulty even separating the words. And then a lot of words that sound similar can be confused without context clues. They don’t even share all the same sounds. If you’re not familiar with the sound, you might think it’s just a weird grunt, or confuse it with a similar sound.
And they would mix the code in with conversation, so they couldn’t tell where it started or ended.
From a crytography POV, it probably would have been easy. But when you can’t even get a reliable copy of the ciphertext, forget about it.
Not only is Navajo a super difficult language, it’s got a lot of idiom and descriptive language where English or German speakers would use nouns. Just google “Navajo weather report”. Plus, code talkers actually agreed on a code and it described actions in fanciful language and called military terms various animals. So, long messages in a guttural, high-inflection language with no roots to Romance or Asian languages, spoken in idioms and substitution of critter names or descriptions for nouns. I picked up medical Spanish in two months, but I’ve been surrounded by the Navajo language for two years and I got nothing but hello and thank you. There’s tons of younger Navajo who can’t speak it and barely understand it because it’s just…hard.
Other’s have already explained that the language was not well known. In fact, Navajo was not the only native language used and there are some others as well for that reason.
But the thing about Navajo in particular is that it is a tonal language. This means that a given word can have multiple, unrelated meanings depending on the tone with which it is pronounced. Chinese is also a tonal language, for example. This makes it much more difficult to figure out. From what I understand, Navajo is a particularly difficult language to learn in the first place.
On top of that,the coded version was made purposely so that only the most skillful speakers could speak and understand it in real time. Only a single non-Navajo speaker could manage it (they had several who had grown up with the Navajo) and many actual navajo were unable to qualify. This made it next to impossible, even if the Japanese could figure out which language it was (already unlikely) and get their hands on a native speaker (already nearly impossible) to actually decode anything.
It was a poorly documented language with no speakers in Germany or japan. It had multiple encryption layers – it was not just English encoded in another language. To translate it, first you needed the vocabulary. Then you needed to understand the grammar – to understand whether “boy dog bite” means the boy bit the dog or the dog bit the boy. Then there was the idioms – the code talkers were all from the same community and talked to each other like native speakers from the same neighbourhood. You would need to understand that sayings like “we are going to make a few omelettes” meant things were going to get messy and not that they were making breakfast. And lastly, they did word substitutions – so even when you got through all of that, you would need to know that (for example – I don’t know the actual code words) “orange mushroom” meant “the president”.
In many ways, it was a very robust encryption technique, the only risk being if the enemy had a native Navaho speaker that the allies didn’t know about.
Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the gold.
In general terms, in order to decode something, you have to have some idea of what you are looking for. You use the rules of the language you expect to find upon decoding to look for patterns. For example a mistake that the Germans made in WWII was the frequent use of “Heil Hitler” .
You know the phrase is there and you know the number of letters. You know that there are two ‘E’s and you know where in the sequence of the phrase they will fall. So, if you find the right number of characters with the same character in the right place in the sequence:
You now know the designator for ‘E’ and by deduction H, I, L T, and R.
That’s a fair start, since you know you are looking for German words. By the way, the Germans also used the same routine opening especially in weather reports, so you got almost all of the letters.
However in a Navajo message you intercept even if the same phrase is repeated, you don’t know the the language you’re looking at, so you are looking for patterns in English… that don’t mean a thing in Navaho. Additionally, you are looking for military words like tank or airplane but they aren’t there.
The last thing is that Navaho was used for verbal transmissions. It’s much harder to do any analytics because you don’t have any easy way to determine individual characters or even breaks between words when it’s a conversation between two fluent speakers using a vernacular. An example in English would be “HiHowYaDoin”. “Copasetic!”
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