Dear Readers:
This morning I was browsing the Russian MSM and I saw this piece, which linked to this piece. I found this interesting, because it doesn’t seem like radio signallers get as much attention or admiration as they used to. I am sure we all grew up on those thrilling stories about WWII, the breaking of the German Enigma code, that sort of thing.
The first piece is entitled “The Tuva Phenomenon”, and this story reminds me of those American Navajo Indian Codetalkers of WWII. Although the Navajos had no particular reason to be patriotic to the Federal Government of the United States of America (allude to the infamous Long Walk of 1864), their leaders felt it would be best for their people if they were allowed to contribute to the war effort against the Japanese. And so they did. Expert American cryptographers thus created an unbreakable code based on the Navajo language. This cypher kept the Japanese stumped right up until the end of the war.
Unlike the Navajos, the Tuvans were not particularly mistreated by the Russians, neither under the Tsars, nor even under Stalin. In 1944 Tuva joined the USSR more or less voluntarily; and in 1992 was a signatory to the treaty which created the Russian Federation. This country lies way out there in southern Siberia, bordering on Mongolia, to the South. Ethnic Tuvans speak Tuvan as their native language. According to wikipedia, Tuvan is a member of the Turkic language family. The grammar is Turkic, but the vocabulary includes many borrowed words from Mongolian, Tibetan, and Russian. Just from scanning the description, one can see that Tuvan is a very complex language, both phonologically (it has relatively few consonants, but many vowels and also length and pitch) and grammatically. Which would make it perfect as the kind of language that nobody can learn unless they imbibed it with their mother’s milk!
This video shows a cute Tuvan girl presenting utterances in her native tongue; and gives one an idea of the flavor and beauty of the spoken language. On the vid click on “cc” if you want English subtitles:
Long story short, we are seeing Tuvan units serving in the Russian Armed Forces, and even, apparently, on the front lines of the Special Military Operation against the Ukraine.
And we also see that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are unable to comprehend the radio signals of these soldiers from the Tuva Republic. The reporter, Darya Dmitrova, quotes the words of a Tuvan soldier fighting against Ukraine. Nikolai Cham’yan works as an Instructor in the Signals unit: “We use our native Tuvan language in our communications, that way if the enemy intercepts one of our communications, they can’t understand a word we are saying!”
Radio Olympics
The related story concerns an international military competition which took place from 13-27 August last month. It is called Army International Games (АрМИ) and is a militarized version of the Olympics.
Here is a list of the countries which took part in the Games this year (in alphabetical order according to the spelling in the Cyrillic alphabet):
Azerbaijan, Angola, Armenia, Bangladesh, Belorussia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Greece, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Israel, Iran, India, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, China, Kirgizia, Laos, Myanmar, Morocco, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Serbia, Tadjikistan, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Philippines, South Africa.
[So yeah, Russia is a completely isolated and shunned country… much?]
This year (2022) was the first year in which any Latin American nations competed in these games; and the Sniper event of the games took place in Venezuela. The Paratrooper event was held in Algiers, where Russian paratroopers not only took the Gold, but even set a world record!
One of the sports which make up this competition is called “Confident Reception” (Уверенный прием) and it pits Army Signallers from different nations against each other. Which loops us back to our story about the Tuva signallers.
The Signals event has separate categories for ladies and men. Among the ladies teams, Belorussia came in first; Uzbekistan second; and Russia/Vietnam tied for the bronze. Among the men, Russia/Belorussia tied for first place; Uzbekistan/ Vietnam tied for second place; and Laos took the bronze medal.
Awful Avalanche 
Sorry Yalensis, I have to admit I am puzzled by the relevance of the piture of the rubber fetishist. Is it something to do with our earlier comments on Sade?
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You mean the gladiator pic? No, sorry, that was my lame attempt to compare International Army Games with Roman spectacles. The conceit was, that Roman officials bring in best fighters in the world… oh, never mind!
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If I was a gladiator I would want the full use of my hands, I would not cripple them by winding long strips of rubber (maybe leather?) around them, which would contrict the blood circulation hence strength, and an arrow could go between the bands. Leather gloves, on the other hand, would give fuller protection without restricting circulation. Similarly if I was using iron sheet as armour, I might use strips to give some flexibility, knowing that the edges are a weak point therefore it is a compromise. But strips of rubber/leather? Ignorant stupidity! A stitched leather jacket would be more realistic.
So yes, rubber/leather fetishist fake gladiator, I would say – a fetish coming from video games most likely! The stupid things people do without thinking properly!
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If I was a gladiator, I would just drink poison before my very first match. Better to die of poison than a stab wound, is my thinking!
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Oho, thanks for an interesting one, Tuvan certainly has a euphonious sound. The Navajo code talkers were a hell of an interesting story, and bravo to the Russians for pinching a good idea.
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it has relatively few consonants, but many vowels and also length and pitch
What do you mean by “pitch”? Tonal? Judging from the video it certainly does not seem to be a tonal language.
However there appears to be a fashion among “woke” linguists today to call every language and his grandma “tonal” without the slightest whiff of factual basis. Burmese, for example, they claim is “tonal” – if that is true then German, English, French and Italian are all “tonal” languages. Burmese is NOT tonal. TONAL – according to traditional definitions, and any definition to the contrary is pure bullshit, means that tonal differences between otherwise identical words form a distinction between the sounds of different words whereby the tonal difference is a critical determinant of the meaning. For example in Central Thai dialect (for illustration purposes simplifying the translitteration), /klai/ with a falling tone means nearby, whereas /klai/ with a neutral tone means far away. The sounds are identical apart from the tone. That is not the case with Burmese, where the only thing that might be confused with being tonal is purely cultural, speaker dependent, and has no effect on meaning. I wonder if that also might be true of Tuvan.
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Well, not speaking a word of Tuvan myself, I just had to rely on the wikipedia article. By the way, I understand that wiki cannot be trusted for political/historical entries, but I have always found them to be reliable to purely Scientific Linguistics entries, since those posts are written by reputable scholars.
Anyhow, this is what wiki had to say about vocalic pitch:
Vowels
Vowels in Tuvan exist in three varieties: short, long and short with low pitch. Tuvan long vowels have a duration that is at least (and often more than) twice as long as that of short vowels. Contrastive low pitch may occur on short vowels, and when it does, it causes them to increase in duration by at least a half. When using low pitch, Tuvan-speakers employ a pitch that is at the very low end of their modal voice pitch. For some speakers, it is even lower and using what is phonetically known as creaky voice. When a vowel in a monosyllabic word has low pitch, speakers apply low pitch only to the first half of that vowel (e.g. [àt] ‘horse’).[9] That is followed by a noticeable pitch rise, as the speaker returns to modal pitch in the second half of the vowel.
You’re right, though, because the more I read in this section, the more it appears to be that pitch is is simply a phonetic phenomenon and maybe does not have the phonemic impact of vocalic pitch in, say, Mandarin Chinese.
Any Tuvan scholars out there? Is pitch phonetic or phonemic?
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Thanks. So not directly claimed to be tonal. Based on your description it sounds as though the “low pitch” might have a fixed relation to vocabulary, but at the same time I would speculate that maybe it can be related to a “vowel quality” rather than (or in parallel to) pitch – reinforced by the fact they call it a “creaky vowel” – in which case that ought to reinforce my argument that the description as “tonal” is probably not appropriate.
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On the ARMY games … there is a rumour the UK wanted to hold a competing Army Games in the UK this year but nobody showed up, and the squirrels made off with all the medals.
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The squirrels were misinformed. They were told the games involved gymnastics: jumping. tree-climbing, somersaults, and parkour, primarily. At which they excel, but they make lousy soldiers, lacking discipline…
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I place this comment here in the hopes it will not be deleted for being off-topic. I edited this from a comment I put up at Gilbert Doctorow’s blog-spot on 02SEP2022 at 18:30. Tragic figures are often denounced by those who stood by and did nothing…many Russians it seems, have forgotten how the just reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev echo in today’s modern Russia. The following not a popular POV with the pro-Russia crowd and certainly not in the pro-DC/London axis. That said, somebody, I think, should voice acknowledgement to Mikhail Gorbachev’s contributions.
=============================================================
Rest in Peace Mikhail Gorbachev, for blessed are the peace makers.
Every mortal borne will sin, that is the lot of all humans, all will fail, all will make mistakes, in this Mikhail Gorbachev is like any other leader past or, present but…
The sins of Mikhail Gorbachev are vastly over-amplified by many Russians, all the while ignoring the situation presented to the Soviet leaders of Gorbachev’s era. Somehow, for many, the Soviet-Empire’s downfall is to blamed on one man, if true, this is unprecedented in human history and as such, this outrageous claim requires extraordinary proof and…I see little of that.
While Soviet leadership was short lived just prior to Gorbachev’s rise, there was a character who was a politically long-lived, particularly, for somebody who rose while under Stalin’s rule. Leonid Brezhnev served as leader of the Communist Party from 1964-1982 and as Premier, only Stalin ruled longer and Brezhnev’s rule was, by any concurrent* western standard, corrupt, inefficient and economically inept all of which led to the technological gap with the West*. And yet, this Brezhnev dude is hardly ever mentioned in the USSR’s downfall…pour-quoi?
The aspersions cast at Mikhail Gorbachev vis-à-vis the downfall of the USSR are artifacts of fantastical thinking, hardly worth consideration and yet, they survive because they exculpate so many sins and so many sinners.
No, Mikhail Gorbachev tried mightily to save the bloated beast through genuine reform combined with an effort to rule justly. In many ways, Gorbachev was Putin’s direct predecessor. Let me be clear, Putin would have failed had he been handed the reigns of power during Gorbachev’s epoch, Russia needed to be reconstituted into a more cohesive nation. And while I credit Putin for much of Russia’s cohesion, it was through DC/London’s brutal reign of neocolonialism…that Russia has been reconstituted, not purposely, no, ironically…in the truest sense of the word. And before our very eyes, we watch DC/London reap in Ukraine the bitter fruit it sowed in the post USSR world…and yeah, I really do think.
Good people, let Mikhail Gorbachev rest in peace, he did more than 99.999% of the human race to advance the cause of a just world, his heart was in the right place. Had DC’s leadership not abandoned FDRism in the years preceding Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power we would now live in a time of peace & prosperity. Do not blame Gorbachev for the sins of his predecessors, nor blame Mikhail for the sins that belong solely to DC/London’s triad of deceit, the national-security-state, their media minions, the party apparatus and apparatchiks of the monolithic 2-party system.
Rest in peace Mikhail Gorbachev, you were a good man and time will judge more kindly than today’s Monday morning quarterbacks, I mourn your passing.
*[FDRism-RIP-circa 1932-1978]
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S Brennan, you are a valued contributor to my blog, and I would never delete a comment for being off-top, so don’t need to worry about that.
Gorbachov, though: UGH! don’t get me started…. You have no idea how much I loathe that guy…
😦
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Yalensis you have shown that yours is not a closed mind, hopefully, in the fullness of time you will consider my arguments regarding much maligned Gorbachev.
Let me demonstrate how public perception is often at odds with historical facts.
A historical misjudgement widely believed; “Peace for our time” Prime Minister Chamberlain is popularly blamed for “appeasing” Hitler and in so doing, enabling Hitler to start WWII. Fair enough. However, not so widely known is that a chap named Winston Churchill was in FULL SUPPORT of Neville Chamberlain’s stance of appeasement because, at the time, ~1938, the English needed to buy time for England’s war industry to update it’s antiquated fighting machines, particularly, aviation. Yet…few know that these two men are tied to the policy of “appeasement”…why is that?
Let’s see, if Churchill’s “buying time” is seen accurately then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact could also be seen in this light…no?
And that brings to mind a relevant question, if Gorbachev negotiations are seen by Russians as “traitorous” then surely they are dwarfed by Stalin’s “negotiations”…true no? Why the double standard?
And it is here that your above remarks on the teaching of history are most apropos, often the teaching of history is less about history and more about current politics and textbooks on history reflects this fully…as you have so well elicited.
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S Brennan, I totally agree with you about the Chamberlain/Churchill thing, and how history became so distorted about this. I always roll my eyes when people start using that “appeasement” meme to justify their war-mongering ways.
I understand that you are making an analogy with Gorbachov, as in “the popular wisdom is wrong here as well.” But in this case I believe that the “popular wisdom” (well, at least among the majority of Russians) is actually spot-on.
My biggest beef against Gorbachov… Well, here is a link to a post that I wrote WAY BACK in 2015 (gods, has it been THAT long?), it’s a 3-part post called None Dare Call It Treason.
Especially read parts II and III if you want to see my main point… It’s based on some published transcripts of a telephone conversation between Gorbachov and George Bush Daddy. In which Gorby literally and knowingly opened Russia’s nuclear shield (for the course of a few hours) to a potential U.S. first strike. That shows just how very traitorous he was, and how duped by American B.S.
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I read it fully. I kept waiting for soup to be served; against Gorbachev, it’s a pretty thin gruel you’re serving up, however, the soup does thicken to stew with regard to Yeltsin…who had no previous relationship with Bush [the 1st]. As for Gorbachev’s diplomatic assurances to Bush, every single leader in the world of yesteryear, before the crudeness of Kagan/Nuland/Cheney et al, would have talked in such diplomatic tones [and assurances] to those with which they had long term contact.
But Yeltsin had no reason to be so overtly “cordial” unless they had a relationship back when Bush [the 1st] ran the CIA. BTW, it was Bush [the 1st] that instituted a putsch against all FDRists, [of either political party], within the CIA, which led to the gross incompetence now displayed by ALL the 3LAs to this day. While Yeltsin actions against the interests of the Soviet/Russian people are well known, I know little of his activities in the 1970’s. Clearly, I need to educate myself on this subject.
That said, Yeltsin CLEARLY betrayed both the USSR & Russia peoples to a degree that is hard to imagine and yet, people prefer to project the multitude of betrayals by Yeltsin against USSR/Russia onto Gorbachev.
Why?
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Well, in my view Yeltsin and Gorbachov were equally traitorous. However, Yeltsin gets a pass. Why? Because he was Putin’s mentor, of course! So everybody still has to grovel to his memory.
Anyhow, thanks for reading my older post, I appreciate you taking the time to do that. It might be thin gruel, but it still makes me sick to my stomach to see Gorby caring more for Bush Daddy’s peace of mind on Christmas Day, than caring about Soviet citizens having no nuclear shield above their heads for the course of several hours, until the codes were turned over to Drunky.
Having said that, I have to give Bush Daddy an ounce of credit for his humanitarian instincts. If he was Biden, he probably would have skipped the egg-nog and jumped at the chance to use that time-gap for a first strike on Moscow. Heck, he would have rode the first rocket down himself, like Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove!
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Odd that you bring up Dr. Strangelove…by chance I re-watched it last night !
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I am psychic, didn’t you know? (Or perhaps psychotic?)
Either that, or we are mutually connected in the Jungian collective consciousness — woo, spooky!
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Gorby caring more for Bush Daddy’s peace of mind on Christmas Day, than caring about Soviet citizens having no nuclear shield above their heads for the course of several hours
I never once cared about any type of nuclear protective shields, quite the opposite. I would have if I were Russian?
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If you were Russian (or lived in Russia) then you would have worried about Americans nuking you at the first window of opportunity. Especially if they thought they could get away with a first strike.
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*[FDRism-RIP-circa 1932-1978]
Franklin D. Roosevelt seems to be considered the devil incarnate by a large section of the US society. 😉 FDRism?
But why 1932 (1933 New Deal?) to 1978. What happened in 1978?
What is this about? A putsch against all FDRists? Would you care to explain?
But Yeltsin had no reason to be so overtly “cordial” unless they had a relationship back when Bush [the 1st] ran the CIA. BTW, it was Bush [the 1st] that instituted a putsch against all FDRists, [of either political party], within the CIA, which led to the gross incompetence now displayed by ALL the 3LAs to this day
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On the list of participating countries, one name seems out of place. Why is the bandid entity occupying Palestine allowed to be involved? Syria and “Israel” meeting on the same playing field? Something is wrong with this picture.
Antoinetta III
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Antoinetta, I agree with you, and I was surprised to see that. I have no explanation… Israel is on my shitlist too, right now, in case anybody is wondering…
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The country on the list that I wondered about, had never heard of, and was about to look up, was Los, until I saw Laos mentioned as winning a medal. The other surprise was Greece instead of Turkey.
The whole subject of Tuvan is fascinating. Should I say I don’t speak a word of Tuvan, or instead that I don’t sing a note of it?
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Incidentally, I found an interesting relevant video on a video hosting site I’m willing to use (as opposed to the vile censorious site linked): https://odysee.com/@Humor:f5/Tuvan:2
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the actual one you linked, anywhere I’m willing to watch it.
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Tuvan throat singers, yeh!
Eventually that “vile site” will die (I hope). But for now they still have more content than most of the others, alas.
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“Type in haste, copy/paste…”
Fixed it to Laos, sorry!
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The use of Tuvans sounds like a bit of boosting of his countrymen by the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu. Great idea, though.
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Oh, that’s right! I forgot that Shoigu is a Tuvan himself. I wonder if he still remembers the mother tongue…
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Did not know that..hmm
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Well, if the Ukrainians wanted to emulate the Russian idea of using the Tavan language the way the US did with Navajo in WW2, they could do worse than converse in Klingon on their walkie-talkies or smartphones. Of course, darn, I forgot, Trekkies could decode that, but Klingon suits Ze to a tee. How about the Geordie “language” of Newcastle UK instead? It totally flummoxed me the first and only time I visited that place.
As for the International Army Games, I at first thought it a spoof, but it has a Wikipedia page. Unfortunately, the 30-odd “sports” aren’t listed, but I assume in the Supply And Services Division face-off, the portable bread ovens that fascinated me in the liberation of Mariupol would have won by a country mile. My mouth just waters thinking of those fat plump loaves they produce. Perhaps the Philipines won the potato-peeling contest.
What a strange competition! I see there are others worldwide as well, where self-important military types vie for supremacy in various disciplines. There’s apparently even more free and easy money slopping around at the world’s military HQs than I had imagined. Shipping off equipment and bods here, there and everywhere for a contest cannot be inexpensive. I wonder if they perform drug tests on the physical participants, useful if Ukraine attends?
However, the “real” World Military Games themselves are athletics and team games as you’d find normally on civvy street, not for champs in tanks and howitzer lanyard pulling, or indeed pontoon bridge building across the Irrawaddy during monsoon season.
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The “Army Bread-Oven” bake-off event, haha, that would be funny!
Or maybe the “Great Army Cupcake” Iron Chef competition?
Hey, you know, there IS something cool about being human after all, when you realize that there is a competition (somewhere in the world) for literally everything. Even stuff like dog frisbie.
Don’t get me started on potato-peeling, though… it drives me nuts to see when people remove the only part of the potato that actually has some taste to it!
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Just catching up on the posts.
As regards Tuvan being used by Russian army signallers, could the fact that the father of the Russian Minister of Defence is a Tuvan have anything to do with this, I wonder.
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Hey, Exile! Nice to see you again.
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Hello Yalensis!
I’ve been out in the sticks since May, only returning to the “City of Satan”, as the late and not lamented Senator McCain’s dimwit daughter once described Moskva, on 4 September. Out in the country, I had problems all summer with an unstable Internet connection. Don’t know why: never happened before. So back in the beating black heart of Mordor, I can now catch up on all your blogs and comments.
Слава России!
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Welcome back, there is a lot to catch up on!
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