"Bert Hyman" wrote in message
...
(COLIN LAMB) wrote in
:
Most of the acronyms or abbreviations were recognized,
but one that
caught me by surprise was "Pascoela = Natives have
plundered
everything from the wreck". Not too sure it would be
useful today.
I am guessing Pascoela is an acronym from another
language.
That's not an acronym or abbreviation but a code, intended
to hide the
meaning of the message. Pascoela is the Portugese name for
Easter
Monday (I think).
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/codebooks.html
Until about 1905 the vast majority of code books
supplied
actual dictionary words (or artificial words) as
their code
words, such as ``Snatch = Sutter Packing Co., Yuba
City,
Cal.'' in the private code of the California Fruit
Canners'
Association, or ``Pascoela = Natives have plundered
everything
from the wreck,'' in the very popular
general-purpose ABC
Code, some supplied number equivalents -- sometimes
instead
of, and sometimes in addition to-- the code word
equivalents.
But in the first decade of this century code books
began
appearing with code words which were meaningless
and often
unpronounceable fixed length groups of letters,
usually of
five letters. Thus, in a later edition of the ABC
Code we have
``ewvgl = Pascoela = Natives have plundered
everything from
the wreck'' and so on.
--
Bert Hyman | St. Paul, MN |
I found a scanned copy of the "Philips Code" on the
web, don't remember where. The Philips Code was a
compilation of the abreviations used by telegraphers and
includes those for commerce and press use. It will show you
the origin of currently used CW abreviations like 73 and 88
adn SK, which is really the number 30 translated from
American morse.
Word codes, usually five letter combinations, were
introduced to reduce cost for transmission and also increase
speed especially via cable. Two widely used ones were the
ABC code and Bentley's Code. I don't know if anyone has
scanned and posted either. Both ABC and Bentley's went
through many editions with additional groups added for new
terms in the same way that dictionaries add new words. Each
group could stand for a whole sentence. I have an ABC code
book in deep storage somewhere.
--
---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA