You are here MA&T Programme Fourth Class Challenges Help With Challenge 8

First a little bit of history! During World War 2 the American marines had great difficulty sending secret messages between each other because whatever code they used the Japanese codebreakers were able to decipher it and therefore knew of their plans. This led to the death of many US soldiers and the destruction of US ships and planes.

The messages were written in English and then changed with various ciphers so that the messages would look like gobbledygook if the Japanese got their hands on them. However, the Japanese codebreakers were often educated in American universities before the war started and so were able to crack the codes without too much trouble. This is a little like you have been doing up to now - you have managed to get all 7 secret messages decoded even though they were quite difficult because you knew they were written in English! So, well done so far.

What I have done with Challenge Number 8 is to copy what the Americans did when they created an unbreakable code to prevent the Japanese from reading their secret messages! Challenge Number 8 is not impossible or unbreakable though!

What did the Americans do? How did they encode secret messages so that the Japanese could not read them? What they did was very clever indeed. They wrote their messages in a language only understood by a very small number of people, and never seen or heard by the Japanese. What was this language? It was a language never even written down! This language was spoken by the Navajo Indian Tribe (pronounced "NAH-vuh-ho") who lived in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado in the USA. Most English speakers find the language very difficult to pronounce. If you'd like to know an easy Navajo word, "yá'át'ééh" (sounds a little like yah-ah-t-ay) means "hello" in Navajo. If you would like to see some Navajo words and pictures of what they mean click here.

So how did I encipher Challenge Number 8. Well I certainly did not use the language of the Navajo Indians! But I did use the second language taught in our school! Arís?

The message (or least part of it) was written in Irish. But a separate Caesar Wheel with only the 18 letters found in the Irish Alphabet was not used. (This was something I didn't even think of doing until Ryan pointed it out! Perhaps I will use this in the next one!) The full Caesar Wheel with the 26 letters of the English alphabet was used for all the message even though it was written in two languages. Sounds complicated but when you crack the code it will as usual all seem easy. Good luck and don't give up. This should take you at least a few days! Arís?