Trivia: the German government funded scholarships in the 1930s for their students to travel to North American and learn native languages. The US and Great Britain had made some use of them in WWI (American Indian languages but also Celtic ones) to fool the Germans, and they were anticipating a potential future war.
The Japanese, on the other hand, not only didn't understand our native languages, but couldn't even use their own, having paid almost no attention to Ainu and the Okinawan languages that they did everything in their power to suppress. The greatest scholars of those language (Batchelor for Ainu, Chamberlain for Okinawan) were both Britons, and they had better documentation in English than they did in Japanese!
It sure stumped the Nazi's.....
Trivia: the German government funded scholarships in the 1930s for their students to travel to North American and learn native languages. The US and Great Britain had made some use of them in WWI (American Indian languages but also Celtic ones) to fool the Germans, and they were anticipating a potential future war.
The Japanese, on the other hand, not only didn't understand our native languages, but couldn't even use their own, having paid almost no attention to Ainu and the Okinawan languages that they did everything in their power to suppress. The greatest scholars of those language (Batchelor for Ainu, Chamberlain for Okinawan) were both Britons, and they had better documentation in English than they did in Japanese!
Thanks for your scholarship on the matter. Some of us do enjoy learning new tidbits of history....:)