) from "Assassins' jargon" to "Assassins" secret language " There was still a thud change to come however It must be remembered that during the days of the Empire, each Great House had the requirements and responsibilities of a national government, including that of a military establishment The army of the Impen- um and those of each Great House needed not only secure channels of communications but also secure codes It appears that the example of the Assassins led to an adoption of their method The word chakobsa under went a thud change of meaning (probably not before 6000), through the process of commomzation, it came to mean an) secret language especially for military purposes In most cases, these various chakobsas also resembled that of the Assassins m nature they were simply intense variants of the mother language heavily loaded with words used m specialized senses Of course, armies with memberships of diverse linguistic back ground (such as the Sardaukar) had chakobsas that amounted to a separate military language Such a chakobsa became part of the unit's esprit de corps furnishing a badge of membership With the metamorphoses of the word in mind, let us examine a particularly thorny example of its use one taken from Princess Irulan's In My Father s House Irulan reports the reminscences of Muad Dib of bis and his mother s acceptance into the Fremen, and their attendance at the ritual in which the water of his antagonist, Jamis was credited to his account Cham blessed the water and added these words "Ekkeri akain, this is the water fillissin fnllasy of Paul Muad'Dib' Kivi a kavi never the more nakalas1 Nakelas' to be measured and counted, ukair an' by the heartbeats jan jan jan of our friend Jamis Paul is then quoted as saying that his mother ' had recognized fragments of the ritual identified the shards of Chakobsa and Bhotani-jib in the words Jessica was certainly in a position to identify the language one of the first Fremen she met on Arrakis was the Shadout Mapes Harq al-Ada reports the conversation of the two women in his House Atreides A Histon cal Overview from notes kept by Jessica herself She had indicated that she recog nized that Shadout was a title and that she knew its meaning In response to Mapes question, Jessica replied, Tongues are the Bene Gessent's first learning I know the Bhotam Tib and the Chakobsa all the hunt ing languages ' Her reply to Mapes shows that she is CHAUMURKY 156 CHENOEH using chakobsa in its original sense the chakobsa of the Fremen was not just the code of hunted clans living on the margin of the law, a slang of their own devising for security, but the language of the Assassins That first Bhotam-denved code worked admirably for their purposes, but one wonders how the Fremen came to know it Note too that the Fremen used it not only for secrecy during clandestine activities (such as when Stilgar s patrol located Paul and Jessica) for also for ntual purposes, as the water ceremony shows Where then had the Frefflen encountered Bhotam'7 The Zensunnt had originated on Terra, and various tribes dwelled for times on Pontnn, Bela Tegeuse, Salusa Secundus, Ishia, Rossak, and Harmottfhep before their reunion on Arrakis Gwiht Mignail has conjectured that the Sardaukar (whose chakobsa was also a complete language, not just a jargon) used Bhotam-Jib, and that the Fremen came to appreciate its usefulness and acquire mastery in it during their sojourn on the prison planet This theory has an attractiveness in another respect, too suppose that during the Harkonnen administration of Arrakis the Fremen use of Bhotaiu was discovered Shaddam IV had already been uneased by the competence and loyalty of Duke Leto's army, when Leto took possession of Arrakis, the Duke would not only have a much larger supply of trainable fighters in the Fremen, he would also have, coinctdentally, the Sardaukar's military code If such were the case, it was a small bat substantial additional reason to lend the use of the Sardaukar to crush Leto Unfortunately for this handsome conjecture, there is no shred of evidence to support it the chakobsa of the Sardaukar has been completely lost, and the guess that the Fremen learned Bhotani from them is no more than a guess Until additional light is shed on the provenience of the Fremen ntual and hunting language, guesses are all we have CHAUMURKY.