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Re: Navajo codetalking

From:Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
Date:Friday, October 20, 2000, 23:20
John Cowan wrote:

>The conlang-interesting section is the 400-odd Navajo equivalents of >various military terms, which expose underlying Navajo metaphors >(the literal English translation is given as well as the formal >English equivalent).
Take the "metaphors" with a grain of salt. The terms the code-talkers used are not common Navajo. They used a sort of jargon specific to themselves -- they made them up specifically for the job. So they are more of a slang among friends than normal colloquial language. Marcus