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Richard L. Lanigan
structure of the society. One’s place in the group is never in doubt with power
moving from the young up to the old (seniority is power and demand respect).
By comparison, the Navajo tend to display semantic intention by reference to
Nature and ancestral practice.
For our purposes with the code talkers, Nature is the operative concept.
Places and creatures in Nature have names (points of perception) and their characteristic
behavior (perception of process activity) guides the selection of
names. The Nature that the Navajo know is their own environment, the high
desert and rugged mountains of the Southwestern USA. Names for things in this
world became the code names they used in their own language.
Pragmatic markers in American English are the adjectives used to emotionally
describe the speaker’s attitude in the conversation. These are essential to
a listener’s understanding of the mood of the conversation and the degree of
seriousness involved. A direct contrast is British English where noun usage
specifies cognitive precision without emotion. For the British, American’s never
get to the point and they exaggerate everything. For the Americans, the British
are “cold fish” and too judgmental. The respective semantic intent of the
Americans and British are polar opposites when it comes to speaking “English”
or is it “American”?
A word of caution about pragmatic identity markers among the Navajo (cf.
Caswell 2009, Kristofie 2011). The Diné language does not have a “v”, therefore
when the Spanish word “Navajo” is pronounced by a Diné speaker it is
articulated as “Nab-bí-ho” (which like all foreign words is not found in the Navajo-English
dictionary). Persons who make this type of mistake in Diné language
are referred to by the Diné as speaking “Trader Navajo” pidgin (“trader”
referring to White persons speaking English).
3. Developing the code and training its talkers
The idea of Navajo code talkers began with Philip Johnston who was working
as a civil engineer in Los Angeles, California when Pearl Harbor was
bombed by the Japanese. Johnston had grown up at Leuppe, Arizona on the
Navajo reservation as the son of Presbyterian missionaries (somewhat rare as
most missionairies were Catholic). He learned to speak “Trader Navajo” as
a child. He read a news story about the Army’s communication experiment with
Comanche Indians during WWI and decided to advance the idea of Navajo code
speakers. 2 He contacted the area Marine Corps Signal Officer, Major James E.
2
A documentary film account is Navajo Code Talkers: The Epic Story, directed by Allan
Silliphant (1995 Brendan W. Tully; ISBN: 0-9639698-1-1); the fictional film version is
Windtalkers, directed by John Woo (2002, Metro Goldwyn Mayer; ISBN: 0-7928-5378-4).