I read something once about an American telegraph operator who had to switch over to using Russian Morse code during WWII. I wondered how hard that would be, but let it go. The idea came back to me and I decided to settle it.
It would be hard to switch from being able to recognize English words to being able to recognize Russian words, but that’s not the the telegrapher had to do. He had to switch from receiving code groups made of English letters to ones made of Russian letters.
Switching from receiving encrypted English to encrypted Russian is an easier task than switching from English plaintext to Russian plaintext. Code groups were transmitted at a slower speed than words because you can never learn to recognize entire code groups. Also, every letter of a code group is important; you cannot fill in anything from context.
Russian Morse code consists largely of the same sequences of dots and dashes as English Morse code, with some additions. For example, the Russian letter Д is transmitted in Morse code as -.. just like the English letter D. So our telegraph operator could hear -.. and transcribe it as D, then later change D to Д.
The Russian alphabet has 33 letters so it needs Morse codes for 7 more letters than English. Actually, it uses 6 more symbols, transmitting Е and Ё with the same code. Some of the additional codes might have been familiar to our telegrapher. For example Я is transmitted as .-.- which is the same code an American telegrapher would use for ä (if he bothered to distinguish ä from a).
All the additional codes used in Russian correspond to uncommon Latin symbols (ö, ch, ñ, é, ü, and ä) and so our telegrapher could transcribe Russian Morse code without using any Latin letters.
The next question is how the Russian Morse code symbols correspond to the English. Sometimes the correspondence is natural. For example, Д is the same consonant sound as D. But the correspondence between Я and ä is arbitrary.
I wrote about entering Russian letters in Vim a few weeks ago, and I wondered how the mapping of Russian letters to English letters implicit in Morse code corresponds to the mapping used in Vim.
Most Russian letters can be entered in Vim by typing Ctrl-k followed by the corresponding English letter and an equal sign. The question is whether Morse code and Vim have the same idea of what corresponds to what. Many are the same. For example, both agree that Д corresponds to D. But there are some exceptions.
Here’s the complete comparison.
Vim Morse А A= A Б B= B В V= W Г G= G Д D= D Е E= E Ё IO E Ж Z% V З Z= Z И I= I Й J= J К K= K Л L= L М M= M Н N= N О O= O П P= P Р R= R С S= S Т T= T У U= U Ф F= F Х H= H Ц C= C Ч C% ö Ш S% ch Щ Sc Q Ъ =" ñ Ы Y= Y Ь %" X Э JE é Ю JU ü Я JA ä