Declassified in 1968! Wow. I guess they thought they might use that trick again.
I remember reading that they had to develop ways of describing words that didn't exist in Navajo, like "submarine," which became "iron fish." I'm studying Gregg shorthand right now and have thought about this a lot, since there are quite a few words that can't be found in existing word lists. Kind of a fun challenge, but ideally you come up with something that somebody else could figure out on their own while reading your shorthand. Even though the Navajo were talking in code, things like "iron fish" turned out the same way--easy to remember and easy to decipher if you knew the language, because at that level, facilitating communication was more important than the overly defensive word-guarding stuff.
Makes sense to me. There was every reason to think that a hot war with the Soviet Union was in the cards, and the nuclear arsenal didn't reach the point of "fifteen minutes of war, then everyone is dead" until sometime in the 60s at the earliest.
With Gregg shorthand, isn't the base layer syllabic? So even if there isn't a standard contraction, isn't the representation for an unknown or nonsense word pretty straight forward?
Isn't all declassification like that? They seem to have a required cooldown period. After all, once you let the cat out of the bag you can't get it back in- so what's the rush.
On the human side of things, I recall reading in a history of the code talkers how several of them were unable to get a job for their skillset of operating and working on radios directly as a result of the classified nature of their work. Whereas your run-of-the-mill white GI, or in some cases non-code-talker Najavo, could point out his work in the service your Navajo code-talker could not.
Why are you comparing them to "run-of-the-mill white GI(s)"? What purpose does this serve? For any person who works on classified projects in military service, the person can't point out specifics of his work, whether Navajo or not.
Do you have anything better to do than nit-pick my comment with your fucking autistic response? Take the comment for the information it provides and run with it.
I remember reading that they had to develop ways of describing words that didn't exist in Navajo, like "submarine," which became "iron fish." I'm studying Gregg shorthand right now and have thought about this a lot, since there are quite a few words that can't be found in existing word lists. Kind of a fun challenge, but ideally you come up with something that somebody else could figure out on their own while reading your shorthand. Even though the Navajo were talking in code, things like "iron fish" turned out the same way--easy to remember and easy to decipher if you knew the language, because at that level, facilitating communication was more important than the overly defensive word-guarding stuff.