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Re: OT: Codetalkers

From:# 1 <salut_vous_autre@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 16:15
>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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James W <emindahken@...>