Codes

The simplest way to create a language for your writing project is to create a code. Essentially you disguise the fact the you are still using English. This is good enough when you just need a word or two of alien dialect, just to set the tone.

It must have been some summer, perhaps before the Spanish class I mentioned yesterday. My brother and I decided one evening to come up with a language just for ourselves. We made up 10 to 15 words, thought up names for ourselves and laughed and laughed about how clever we were. We promised each other we'd do some more on our language the next evening after our summer jobs. Not too surprisingly, by the next evening we were both off thinking about things that had nothing to do with a language for ourselves.

What little we did was a form of code. You replace an English words with a gibberish words and no one who doesn't know the code can make heads or tails of what you are saying. The problem with such an unstructured code is that without a codebook somewhere that everyone involved with the code can reference, it is next to impossible to keep track of the vocabulary.

The US government was certain for a decade after World War Two that it's use of Native Americans and their tribal languages was a big secret. The fact is that too many Americans saw them communicating and after the war the word spread. The Soviet Union spent an unbelievable amount of resources on scholars learning and studying Native American Indian languages so that they could never be used against them. The effort was, of course, wasted. The Native languages were only used in situations where the information sent was used almost instantly, such as in artillery support. This is the sort of instance when almost any code no matter how simple will work as long as the folks at both intended ends are absolutely fluent in the code, and the enemies who are directly intercepting the messages are not. Just ten minutes spent by the enemy getting the coded message to their code breaker, figuring out the message and alerting the right people would be way too much time. The Army insisted on using coded words in the Native languages as well. The code words were real Native American words and not that hard to remember. The languages themselves were never unravelled during the war, so the extra coding was something of a wasted effort, as well. But since real languages were being used, that was the only part of the "Code Talkers" that lived up to their name.

More tomorrow