<p>Languages are governed by certain laws/principles, that reflect the relationships between elements. For example, element frequency: you generally have a few elements which are very common, and a long tail of rare events.</p>
<p>To make a language hard to learn, break those rules. Make each word/phoneme/letter equally frequent. Common words are short and have several meanings, long words are rare and generally have fewer meanings (as they are more specific). Turn that the other way round. Make long words frequent and unspecific.</p>
<p>Early codes where cracked with frequency tables, ie the letters &quot;e&quot; and &quot;t&quot; being the most common symbols, so substitution ciphers were easily solved. Mix up the spelling of your words to make them semi-random (maybe add some random letters in the middle that are ignored).</p>
<p>The language you will end up with this way will be pretty unusable, and very hard to learn.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-10-31T09:40:36.303Z
2023-10-31T09:40:36.303Z
Oliver Mason
<p>How to make a language/code indecipherable or very hard to decipher/learn? What are the key points? How does linguists decipher languages?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-10-31T09:17:23.317Z
Your question is very broad and needs narrowing to a smaller topic. Note that this site has constructed languages as its topic, for cryptographic codes there is [cryptography.se].
Sir Cornflakes
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-10-31T13:44:15.827Z
See also https://conlang.stackexchange.com/q/479/142
Sir Cornflakes
<unnatural-features>
To make a conlang indeciphrable
# To make a conlang indeciphrable

(Asked by: username_0 on 2023-10-30)

How to make a language/code indecipherable or very hard to decipher/learn? What are the key points? How does linguists decipher languages?

**Tags:** unnatural-features

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Your question is very broad and needs narrowing to a smaller topic. Note that this site has constructed languages as its topic, for cryptographic codes there is [cryptography.se].  
> **username_1**: See also https://conlang.stackexchange.com/q/479/142  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_2 on 2023-10-31. Score: 3

Languages are governed by certain laws/principles, that reflect the relationships between elements. For example, element frequency: you generally have a few elements which are very common, and a long tail of rare events.

To make a language hard to learn, break those rules. Make each word/phoneme/letter equally frequent. Common words are short and have several meanings, long words are rare and generally have fewer meanings (as they are more specific). Turn that the other way round. Make long words frequent and unspecific.

Early codes where cracked with frequency tables, ie the letters "e" and "t" being the most common symbols, so substitution ciphers were easily solved. Mix up the spelling of your words to make them semi-random (maybe add some random letters in the middle that are ignored).

The language you will end up with this way will be pretty unusable, and very hard to learn.


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