Iron Fish and the Virgin
How a native speaker fills the Triglot grid

The code that was never broken

Early in 1942, Philip Johnston, a civil engineer who had grown up on the Navajo reservation as the son of missionaries, proposed to the U.S. Marine Corps that the Navajo language itself could serve as a battlefield code.

Navajo was unwritten, its grammar was intricate, and outside the Navajo Nation almost no one spoke it. That spring the Marines recruited 29 young Navajo men, now remembered as the Original 29. At Camp Elliott near San Diego they built the code themselves: an alphabet in which each English letter was carried by a Navajo word, and a vocabulary of about two hundred military terms. The vocabulary later grew past four hundred entries, and roughly four hundred Navajo served as code talkers in all six Marine divisions in the Pacific.

At Iwo Jima in February 1945, six code talkers worked around the clock through the first two days of the landing, sending and receiving more than eight hundred messages without an error. Their signal officer, Major Howard Connor, later said the Marines would never have taken the island without them.

The code remained classified until 1968. In 2001 the Original 29 were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, and every other Navajo code talker received the Congressional Silver Medal.

A doctrine and an inerrant message

The code talkers did not improvise. They served under a fixed military doctrine, with a fixed vocabulary for everything a commander might need to say. And every message was treated as inerrant: the officer's words were to arrive exactly as he spoke them, with nothing added, nothing softened, and nothing reinterpreted along the way.

When the language has no word

Navajo had no word for submarine, dive bomber, or battleship. So the code talkers coined one, agreed on it, and used it the same way every time. A submarine became besh-lo, the iron fish. Once coined, the term was fixed: no code talker was free to call a submarine anything else.

The divine Commander's word at Isaiah 7:14

The Triglot works the same way. Its English line is the finished, locked plaintext of what the Commander said. At Isaiah 7:14 that plaintext says virgin. A native-language translator does not reopen the Hebrew and decide the word could be maiden. That decision was made upstream, and the translator's task is to carry virgin exactly.

And it must be carried everywhere. Wherever the Triglot's English line reads virgin or virgins, in any of the 66 books, the native-language line must carry the same agreed word in Hebrew or in Greek — the source text for parthenos Matthew 1:23 and HaAlmah Isaiah 7:14. Click on parthenos in Matthew 1:23 and get the Greek "punch card" below (parthenos, Matthew 1:23) and the same with HaAlmah in Isaiah 7:14 and get the Hebrew "punch card" below. If the language has no such word, the native speaker coins one, exactly as the Navajo coined iron fish, and from then on that word is fixed.

Our Navajo is a Nkongho which is language #4757

For this exhibit, the native speaker comes from the Nkongho people of Cameroon. Nkongho (ISO 639-3: nkc) is a small Bantu language, recognized by SIL International and by Glottolog, with about 4,600 speakers in Joshua Project's current estimate.

A Christian people with no Scripture in their own language. Their first Bible can be built on the Triglot grid, one fixed word at a time.

Rochefort's stack of punch cards

In the same year the Original 29 were recruited, Commander Joseph Rochefort ran Station HYPO, the Navy's codebreaking unit at Pearl Harbor. His team attacked the Japanese fleet code one piece at a time. Every code group they recovered was punched onto an IBM card and filed, so that tabulating machines could sort thousands of intercepts and bring every appearance of the same group together. A meaning solved once became a meaning known everywhere it occurred. That method helped reveal the plan to attack Midway in June 1942.

We use the same method. The native speaker's word for virgin is punched onto its own stack of cards, one card for every verse where the English anchor reads virgin or virgins. Each card has three lines. The first line was Yiddish in the Yiddish Triglot; here it becomes Nkongho. The second line becomes the speaker's pronunciation in IPA. The third line does not change: it is the English anchor.

Babel, or a back translation

Suppose a Nkongho speaker records an audio Bible, reading his own language where the Yiddish once stood. To an English-speaking translation consultant, that recording is Babel: sound without meaning, impossible to check.

Now fill the Triglot grid. Every Nkongho word sits above its pronunciation, and both sit above the English anchor. Line 3 becomes a back translation the consultant can check, word by word, against what the Commander said.

Spiritual warfare, fought with a codebreaker's tools

Giving an accurate, theologically orthodox Bible to all 7,000 languages is spiritual warfare. The men who won the codebreaking war of 1942 did not win it by working harder alone. They won it by fixing their terms, filing every solved piece, and letting machines do the sorting. We borrow from all three.

One template, one locked English anchor, and one native speaker at a time: this is how the race to 2033 can be expedited, automated, and escalated.