Re: THEORY: irregular conlangs

On Sat, 2 Oct 1999, John Cowan wrote:

> Sally Caves scripsit:
>
> > No wonder Navajo was made the code language for the military.
>
> Yup.  Difficult to learn, practically no one outside the U.S. can
> speak it fluently, and it is borrowing-resistant like German,
> so there isn't even a hope of guessing at the content by using
> loanwords -- there are hardly any loanwords to guess at.
> Oh yes: the accent of a non-native speaker is instantly obvious,
> because the native accent is rather unvaried and extremely
> crisp.
Actually, what was used in WWII was a *code* based on Navajo, not the
colloquial language as such.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir