Philip Johnson: The Navajo Language

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In World War Two, the United States government tried multiple times to create an unbreakable code. Yet, every time the Japanese code breakers were able to crack it. Until a man named Phillip Johnson came up with an idea to use the Navajo language as a code. The Navajo people and their culture were not highly documented or highly known. This provided an advantage, since the culture wasn’t well known, it would make it much harder to crack.

Philip Johnson was the son of a Protestant missionary. He spent much of his childhood on a Navajo reservation. Having grown up in that culture he learned their language and their customs. One day he heard about a section of the government trying to use Native American language as a code. The next day he headed to Camp Elliot in California with a few Navajos, he then presented his code idea to the …show more content…
The code they came up with had many different variables to it. A problem that came up was, the Navajo language doesn't have a term for words like “machine gun”. They came up with solutions to this issue. They had to use words from the Navajo language that could be related to the military term. So “Fighter plane”, when translated, was “hummingbird”. The code also included, spelling out the new word using the first letter of their already existing vocabulary. So, the Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant), "be-la-sana" (apple) and "tse-nill" (axe) all would stand for the letter "a." For example if they needed to spell the island of “Tarawa”, they would say “Turkey-ant-rabbit-ant-weasle-ant”, but they would speak it in Navajo. Yet, because this spelling-it-out technique would make it easier to crack, letters carried multiple terms. Using only the first letter of the English equivalent in spelling an English word So,“apple”, “ant” or “axe” were the three options that would stand for the letter
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Words 654 - Pages 3