h a l f b a k e r yIt might be better to just get another gerbil.
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Many of your species' languages are threatened with "extinction" i.e. no fluent speakers remain.
This could be useful.
In WW2, senior British officers sometimes spoke on the telephone in Hindustani, in the certain knowledge that any enemy forces listening would be baffled; and if the information
was tactical and perishable, by the time it was translated it would be of little or no value.
The USA used Navajo "code-talkers" in the Pacific theatre.
So, the idea would be to teach all the soldiers in a Division (or division-sized unit) a "threatened" language.
This would provide a pool of reasonably fluent speakers, help with unit cohesion, and unencrypted verbal communication would be much more secure; the chances of the opposing forces having someone fluent in Basque, Cornish, Saami, or a dialect of Magyar, are very small. Even with improved machine translation, use of slang and codewords can effectively obscure meaning.
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I hate to say it, but this is actually a gwrr....a goowr...a goo... As ideas go, it's not terrible. |
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It should probably be tried with a population that have already fully mastered at least one spoken language first. |
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Well, that rules out the military. |
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The officers, yes. But some senior NCOs have been shown to be
able to count up to four, and in one exceptional case
demonstrated the capacity to come in out of the rain without
being told. |
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Some researchers suggest that they can develop similar tool-
using and reasoning skills to some of the higher primates,
although this view is controversial and not supported by
evidence. A recent study comparing the relative performance of
Royal Marines and baboons was abandoned when the baboons
commenced a legal action through their agent alleging that the
marines were being exploited and being prevented from
indulging in natural behaviors. |
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