The Navajo/Na Dene codetalkers (WW II) developed a real arcane jargon, so I was told. Maybe it was because the conditions of war were completely different than their language's environment so they were forced to invent words, or maybe they thought it was a good idea, or whatever. But I believe transcripts of their transmissions are often mostly unintelligible to native Navajo speakers who weren't in the know.
It is my understanding that the codetalkers invented very few new words, they simply combined the words they already had to create descriptions of things that the language was never meant for. One of the reasons they were so successful was that more than one phrase could mean the same thing. For example, both "A flock of eagles with fire in their bellies is coming from the rising sun" and "Many birds are flying from the east to rain fire on you" Could reliably be translated to "There are bombers coming from the east" Add some new words for specifics that you needed (like altitudes and compass directions) and the codetalkers presented the bad guys with a language that was completely unrelated to anything they had heard before. Also (I copied this from RSA) "The Navaho language is so difficult to learn and its linguistics are so complex that it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to counterfeit its sounds. Furthermore, Navaho seems to have no linguistic connections to any other Asian or European language. Consequently, at any given time, there are only a few thousand people capable of speaking the tongue. For these reasons, the U.S. military made extensive use of hundreds of Native American codetalkers . During World War II, Navaho codetalkers relayed operational orders in the Pacific theater with a level of security that was unattainable by current encryption algorithms. The Japanese signal corps task was further complicated by the codetalkers liberal mix-in of Navaho and military slang resulting in a communications network so secure that it was, in fact, never compromised by Axis powers." In my stone age level of Crypto understanding I would liken this to having a public key that was the Navajo culture and an algorithm to process it that only runs on the human brain. Makes me wonder when somebody will set two AI computers down and tell them to invent a code we can't break. dwl@hnc.com David Loysen 619-546-8877 x245