Re: OT: Codetalkers

>As you probably know, there was also a small group of Comanche
>codetalkers. I
>am trying to remember if I read somewhere that a few Crow speakers did
>this,
>too--anybody heard that?
Comanche and Crow?

I've never heard they did codes like navaho

I read that navaho speakers were chosen to make that code in WW2 because
navaho language were the only language spoken in United-States (so by some
of their soldiers) that weren't studied by german linguists before WW1

That were a so much unknown language that it were estimed that only 28
non-Amerindians were able to speak it and that they were all from
United-States

They also chose it because of its difficulty:

- 4 vowels (a, e, i, o) wich can occur long, nasalized, or with one of the
four tones: high, low, rising or falling.
- 32 consonants, affricates, and ejectives
- Agglutinative with affixes, with tendencies to change the word in
contractions hard to recognize
- Some verbs that, when translated in other languages, are equivalent to
nouns
- The verb agrees with the class and the movement of arguments (I think it's
only the object...)
- A word order wich will vary to place the nouns in animacy order and a
prefix on the verb that will indicates wich of the 2 noun is the subject

Very hard to handle for English, German, French, and Italian speakers of the
war :-P

Does someone here speaks navajo?

It is probably very intersting to learn for a conlanger...



If the subject and the object can only be indicated on the verb, is it a
language that is neither ergative nor accusative?

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