Driving faux environmentalists crazy --
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The Book Page
The Comanche Code Talkers Of World War II, William C. Meadows, c. 2002, University of Texas press.
One of the problems the Comanche code talkers had was that their native language had very few if any words for many military words.
The Comanches first had to come up with a word for military lingo and then put that word into code.
I won't provide the native Comanche word, nor the code word, but here is an example of English military lingo and the word or phrase the Comanches took from their language to name/describe it. Again, once they had the "translation" they then had to put that same word into code.
So, let's go:
- airplane: "flies by itself"
- bomber: "pregnant bird"
- bombs: "baby birds"
- fighter: "they fight flies by itself"
- bayonet: "gun knife"
- 0.30-caliber machine gun: "sewing machine gun"
- 0.50-caliber machine gun: "big sewing machine gun"
- 55 howitzer "two fives or double five big gun"
- automobile: "runs to and fro by itself"
- jeep: "little car"
- mine sweepers: "find it"
- rank: "soldier branded"
- officer: "solder-chief"
- General: "star chief"
- Brigadier General: "one-star branded"
- colonel: "big bird"
- Germans: "our enemy"
- Adolf Hitler: "Crazy White Man"
- railroad: "fire wagon road"
- tunnel: "dugout" -- exact etymology never determined
Well, we kind of set around in groups you now and we kicked it around [the proposed term] and we all agreed on something and we'd go with it. We would sit around like this, just kind of battin' the breeze.
We got to talking about that and somebody come up an idea to call a tank a turtle. Somebody asked him why. He says, "Well the only reason I came up with a turtle is a turtle is like a tank. It's got a hard shell and that's the only reason I believe we could associate the turtle with a tank." We kicked that around and as we passed one word we would write it down."Forty turtles" equaled forty tanks.
The same process had to be repeated for various types of artillery and aircraft. Artillery was distinguished by the caliber size, using standard Comanche numbers, and by the addition of "big" and "small."
Because only one word existed in the Comanche language for all types of airplanes, new terms also had to be created for different types of planes, and the same principle of a base word with various prefixes was used for distinguishing different types of aircraft.
The code talkers [in training] took this very seriously. Fights occasionally broke out over arguments about which words to use. Code talkers were very, very proud of their ideas and would fight to keep them.
Bruce
ReplyDeleteThe code talkers were Navajo. They worked with the Marines in the Pacific theater.
The author of the book points out that his book is only on the Native American code talkers in the European theater. I don't have the book with me, but later, I will clarify that on the blog.
DeleteThe author has tens of pages on the demographics of Native Americans in the US from WWI through WWII and the part that the various nations/tribes played in both wars.
The Native American code talkers were also in WWI. They arrived late during WWI but the war was said to have ended almost immediately upon their arrival. Some have said, according to the author, the arrival of the Native American code talkers was the reason WWI ended (tongue-in-cheek, of course).
On the blog I listed several military words that the Comanches had to translate. The Comanches did not have a word for "flame throwers." It turns out that flame throwers" were common in the Pacific theater but not in the European theater.