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
Cyphers that just substitute letters in the same language still have all the quirks of that language. In English, for example, the most common letter is most likely to be E, there are only certain letters that occur as doubles, there are common prefixes and suffixes you can look for, only two letters are used as complete words… and so on. You can use these recognizable patterns to solve the cypher without a key. You can verify your solution because it will conform to rules of grammar that you know: i.e., if you end up with “HELLO MY NAME IS BILL” your solution is probably correct, whereas if you end up with “DEFTRIUN GLUTYJHN SFEWYBVD” it’s almost certainly not.
Deciphering an unknown foreign language is a completely different affair. It’s not just understanding the vocabulary (and possibly alphabet), but also knowing what to expect for the sentence structure, verb conjugations, and so on. That’s nearly impossible to do without someone familiar with both languages (there are ancient languages that we have many samples of but can’t decipher for this same reason).
First; the Navajo language wasn’t widely known or cataloged, even within North America, let alone outside of the United States.
Second; it wasn’t just that the code talkers were speaking Navajo, it’s that they were also using Navajo words as replacements for the 26 letter military alphabet. The problem for the Japanese is that the code talkers switched very easily between having direct unciphered conversations in Navajo and ciphered conversations relying on Navajo words, thus there was (seemingly) no rhyme or reason behind the messages from the perspective of the Japanese.
Third, and as an extension of the above; many codes were essentially mechanical (i.e. Enigma), meaning that a codebreaker could expect the coded language to follow a rigorous and strictly-defined set of “rules.” The code talkers were using a much more organically-derived language for their code, which meant that rules were much harder to follow, and the code talkers were free to break those rules as they see fit because of how human language works.
Its because the end language wasn’t known and didn’t share common roots with any languages they knew.
You can break english codes if you know english because you know things like “e” is the most common letter, so it will be the most common character in the code. Or if its full sentences then the grammatical structure will be the same.
With navajo they didn’t need to encrypt anything because there wasn’t any point of reference, the words/letters and the end words were different.
The fundamental trick to most cryptography is that at the end of the day its a language you know but just written differently. If you don’t know the language at the end then you are pretty screwed.
To add something new, an extension of your question is “why is it harder to decrypt a nee language than it is a new code”
If you want to decrypt a code in english and you know the language, if that code uses some form of letter substitute (ie you switch the order of letters around) then a starting point for decryption is single letter and double letter words. There are only 2 single letter words (I and A) so if you see a single letter you have a 50 50 shot at knowing what it is, from there you move on to a larger but still limited number of 2 letter words (it, at, to, is ect) and you can figure out a large chunck of the alphabet.
What are the single and double letter words in navajo? Hell if I know
Learn Python. That’s actually one of the easier languages to learn. It’s still an entirely new language.
Because it’s novel. It’s different. Many languages move around verbs and nouns and adjectives…
One of the challenges was that it was used for fast, tactical communication.
If you decrypt an Enigma message two hours later, an U-Boot is probably going to have a bad day.
If you manage to painstakingly translate a code talker message two hours later… doesn’t matter, your troops are already dead.
So even if the Japanese somehow managed to reverse-engineer a foreign language for which they had no native speakers, no textbooks, no written texts in the language, no Rosetta Stone style examples that “X means Y”… that would still not be enough. They’d have to train many people to be able to fluently understand it.
Also, it’s a language, so unlike a code where you have well defined, clear numbers or symbols to work with, it’s a stream of fast-paced, hard-to-understand utterances. And the clock is ticking, doesn’t do you much good if you figure it out in 1945 just as the nuke is falling over Nagasaki.
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