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
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.
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