China's PLA learns Tamil, Malayalam to intercept Indian chatter

[Stephen Cohen]

China's PLA learns Tamil, Malayalam to intercept Indian chatter
China is teaching South Indian languages such as Tamil and Malayalam to wireless radio operators of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The move is to understand intercepts of communication signals of the Indian armed forces deployed along the 3,500 km Line of Actual Control and the international border.

The PLA’s emphasis is more on the spoken aspects of these two South Indian languages, which help facilitate faster communication by the Indian Army. “No coding or decoding of cipher is required with the script and pronunciation of South Indian languages being extremely difficult for any person to comprehend without a working knowledge of these languages,” officials privy to the inputs said.

The Pakistani experience, according to sources, has taught China to learn to understand Tamil, Malayalam and a few other South Indian languages. “During the 1971 India-Pakistan war, our radio operators passed messages and commands on open channels in Tamil, which was Greek to the Pakistani forces. The Pakistanis were foxed by our Tamil and Malayalam-speaking radio operators,” said an official.

“China does not want to repeat the mistake by its all weather friend Pakistan during the 1971 war,” said an intelligent official.

PLA operatives’ understanding of South Indian languages will additionally help Beijing in gathering intelligence from Tamil-dominated pockets in Northeastern Sri Lanka, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had a considerable sway till 2009 before being decimated by the forces of the island nation. China has a deal with Sri Lanka for majority control of Hambantota port in its southeast.

Indian forces such as the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, which guards the Indo-China border, is also training its new troops in Mandarin, the language of mainland China.

Changing Frequency Chinese wireless radio operators are learning Tamil and Malayalam to understand intercepts of the Indian Army

No coding or decoding of cipher is required with the script and pronunciation of South Indian languages
During the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, Indian radio operators passed messages and commands on open channels in Tamil, which was Greek to the Pakistani forces

 

[Stephen Cohen]

http://www.newindianexpress.com/the...alam-to-intercept-indian-chatter-1651707.html

 

[Hassan Guy]

Can't the Chinese just make a translator app

 

[Papa Dragon]

These Chinese couldn't even speak proper English and they're thinking about learning South Indian languages which are the hardest to differentiate from each other and have multiple dialects which differ from each district in the same state. Me being a Southie still find it very hard to learn other South Indian languages even after I am very familiar with them. Good luck with that

 

[nang2]

I was raised in a Chinese military base that focused on intelligence gathering by listening to the military communication in any forms. I can confirm to you that learning foreign languages is a standard practice and it has been so for decades. There are dedicated schools that teach all languages used in the neighboring countries. In fact, one of the major military colleges that are dedicated for training intelligence officers is called a "foreign language college". It is not even a secret.

China's PLA learns Tamil, Malayalam to intercept Indian chatter
China is teaching South Indian languages such as Tamil and Malayalam to wireless radio operators of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The move is to understand intercepts of communication signals of the Indian armed forces deployed along the 3,500 km Line of Actual Control and the international border.

The PLA’s emphasis is more on the spoken aspects of these two South Indian languages, which help facilitate faster communication by the Indian Army. “No coding or decoding of cipher is required with the script and pronunciation of South Indian languages being extremely difficult for any person to comprehend without a working knowledge of these languages,” officials privy to the inputs said.

The Pakistani experience, according to sources, has taught China to learn to understand Tamil, Malayalam and a few other South Indian languages. “During the 1971 India-Pakistan war, our radio operators passed messages and commands on open channels in Tamil, which was Greek to the Pakistani forces. The Pakistanis were foxed by our Tamil and Malayalam-speaking radio operators,” said an official.

“China does not want to repeat the mistake by its all weather friend Pakistan during the 1971 war,” said an intelligent official.

PLA operatives’ understanding of South Indian languages will additionally help Beijing in gathering intelligence from Tamil-dominated pockets in Northeastern Sri Lanka, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had a considerable sway till 2009 before being decimated by the forces of the island nation. China has a deal with Sri Lanka for majority control of Hambantota port in its southeast.

Indian forces such as the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, which guards the Indo-China border, is also training its new troops in Mandarin, the language of mainland China.

Changing Frequency Chinese wireless radio operators are learning Tamil and Malayalam to understand intercepts of the Indian Army

No coding or decoding of cipher is required with the script and pronunciation of South Indian languages
During the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, Indian radio operators passed messages and commands on open channels in Tamil, which was Greek to the Pakistani forces

By the way, China used the similar tactics during the conflict with Vietnam. The army replaced all radio operators with soldiers who spoke a dialect alien to Vietnamese.

 

[Jlaw]

These Chinese couldn't even speak proper English and they're thinking about learning South Indian languages which are the hardest to differentiate from each other and have multiple dialects which differ from each district in the same state. Me being a Southie still find it very hard to learn other South Indian languages even after I am very familiar with them. Good luck with that

English is not official language of China but is official language of India. It's ok for Chinese not to be good in English but Indians are just as bad with English skills.

 

[jetray]

China's PLA learns Tamil, Malayalam to intercept Indian chatter
China is teaching South Indian languages such as Tamil and Malayalam to wireless radio operators of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The move is to understand intercepts of communication signals of the Indian armed forces deployed along the 3,500 km Line of Actual Control and the international border.

The PLA’s emphasis is more on the spoken aspects of these two South Indian languages, which help facilitate faster communication by the Indian Army. “No coding or decoding of cipher is required with the script and pronunciation of South Indian languages being extremely difficult for any person to comprehend without a working knowledge of these languages,” officials privy to the inputs said.

The Pakistani experience, according to sources, has taught China to learn to understand Tamil, Malayalam and a few other South Indian languages. “During the 1971 India-Pakistan war, our radio operators passed messages and commands on open channels in Tamil, which was Greek to the Pakistani forces. The Pakistanis were foxed by our Tamil and Malayalam-speaking radio operators,” said an official.

“China does not want to repeat the mistake by its all weather friend Pakistan during the 1971 war,” said an intelligent official.

PLA operatives’ understanding of South Indian languages will additionally help Beijing in gathering intelligence from Tamil-dominated pockets in Northeastern Sri Lanka, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had a considerable sway till 2009 before being decimated by the forces of the island nation. China has a deal with Sri Lanka for majority control of Hambantota port in its southeast.

Indian forces such as the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, which guards the Indo-China border, is also training its new troops in Mandarin, the language of mainland China.

Changing Frequency Chinese wireless radio operators are learning Tamil and Malayalam to understand intercepts of the Indian Army

No coding or decoding of cipher is required with the script and pronunciation of South Indian languages
During the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, Indian radio operators passed messages and commands on open channels in Tamil, which was Greek to the Pakistani forces

Add konkani,tulu to the list. We can make them run in circles. More over there is difference between the way languages are written and spoken.

 

[Papa Dragon]

English is not official language of China but is official language of India. It's ok for Chinese not to be good in English but Indians are just as bad with English skills.

English maybe one of the official languages of India but most faculty and students in many English medium schools still converse in local languages, so it isn't bad if a sect of Indians have bad English skills. My point is if you guys find it hard to learn English which is a universal language with simple dialects, learning South Indian languages would certainly be a daunting task with hundreds of dialects. Tamil for instance has close to 14 major dialects which are quite distinct with each other and differs within each district in Tamil Nadu itself.

 

[Dark Lord Forever]

English is not official language of China but is official language of India. It's ok for Chinese not to be good in English but Indians are just as bad with English skills.

100% true on point. most indians i know are hving very very bad english. but they claim to be exparts. like india inventend english lanuge. look here on this from so many indians not knowing english. still act like exparts. vey sad.

 

[Rajaraja Chola]

Thank you for the interests in Indian Classical languages Will help promote the languages,

 

[kris]

Add konkani,tulu to the list. We can make them run in circles. More over there is difference between the way languages are written and spoken.

Lol
Both these languages made me go crazy
I can't even understand one word

 

[lastone]

Maybe this worked when software was not developed, but now in the age of google assistant and siri , with their accent deciphering abilities, this wont work.

 

[anniyan]

From China to Chennai

http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/from-china-to-chennai/article6909135.ece

They’ve been part of our cityscape for more than half a century now. On Chinese New Year, dentists from the community tell Esther Elias what it means to follow the profession of their fathers and why Chennai will always be home

To the background score of a dental drill’s drone, Dr. Albert Shieh narrates his life story. As he talks of the Parry’s of his childhood, with its slow trams and lumbering handcarts, much of present-day Parry’s streams in and out of his compact clinic on Evening Bazaar Road. From flower sellers to banana vendors, they all drift by and Albert flits from fluent Tamil to English in his conversations with them. In between, there’s the occasional phone call in his native Mandarin dialect with his wife. A wrinkled old man wanders in, spits out his dentures with a few missing molars, and hands it to Albert. As he expertly shaves off the excesses with his bare hands and moulds it into shape in minutes, a sepia photograph of his dentist father, Dr. Say Maw Seng, who migrated from China and worked in this very room from 1944, watches over him.

Just down the road with eight such Chinese dental clinics, Albert’s brother Dr. Sen feeds a pack of 12 stray dogs rice and chicken just outside his clinic. A graduate of Madras Medical College, and once head of a multi-speciality hospital, Sen now shuttles between the two clinics he’s opened on this stretch for his son Christopher, and daughter Jennifer, both dentists. “My father came from a community of traditional Chinese dentists from the Hubei province of China. I grew up watching him work from the time I was five. When you’re around a craft for that long, it’s only natural that you take it up too!” says Sen. All five of Seng’s sons went on to become dentists and today run practices scattered across Canada, the U.S., Nellore, and Coimbatore. While they are trained in modern dentistry, Albert says their hands still remember their father’s inherited skills. In a little drawer by his doctor’s stool, Albert still treasures the lead and iron tools that his father fashioned and filed by hand.

Their memories of their father’s foray into India, though, are shrouded in grey. The story goes that just before World War II broke out, legions of Chinese civilians, especially from the suburbs, stole out of the nation to escape recruitment into the army. “In fact, my father’s parents deliberately sent him and his wife to Burma,” says Sen. From Burma, a small community of Hubei Chinese are said to have reached Madras by boat; an alternate narrative says they walked their way here. They settled mostly in Park Town and set up practice in Parry’s, and their children born here went on to live markedly Chennaiite lives. While they spoke Mandarin at home, Seng’s children learnt Tamil at school, grew up watching Rajnikanth films and celebrated Deepavali as much as they did Chinese New Year. “I only remember a school that taught us to write Mandarin, somewhere on Armenian Street, which closed down in a year or so,” says Albert.

In the early days, the community married among themselves and religiously followed traditional customs. “I moved with a bunch of Anglo-Indian friends, and my mother used to threaten to throw me out if I married outside our community,” laughs Albert. He went on to wed Yu Kwan, the daughter of his mother’s friend and a girl he’d watched grow up in his neighbourhood. Yu recalls her classic Chinese wedding in Chennai. It was a two-day affair, with a lunch hosted by the girl’s side and dinner by the boy’s side the day before. On the morning of the wedding, the groom would have to go to the bride’s home to take her to the wedding and the girl’s folks would bar his way, until he finally gave in and handed over a “red packet” full of gifts for the family. “The most fun would be at the tea ceremony. To every person that you served tea to, they’d have to give you a ‘red packet’ in return,” says Yu. Besides the Chinese wedding, Yu and Albert also had a Christian wedding at a church, for although they were brought up Buddhist, most of the community converted to Roman Catholicism, and have now branched into various streams of Christianity since. While Sen and family are Protestant, Albert and Yu are Seventh Day Adventists. Albert’s Chinese name, which he hardly uses today, was Hung Sen.

Times have changed since the days of the first-generation migrants. One of Sen’s daughters-in-law hails from Kerala, and Albert’s son Joshua fell in love with and married Meera, a Tamil-Brahmin girl he met at Meenakshi Ammal Dental College. “It’s our children’s happiness, not our customs that count,” says Sen. What’s changed the most though, are the community’s Chinese New Year celebrations, says Dr. David Ma, son of Dr. Y.C. Ma, who founded Venfa Dental Clinic. “For the festivities, we’d cook everything that moved,” he laughs. Yu remembers preparing a spread of at least 10 compulsory dishes, alongside an assortment of soups and starters, all prepared in typical Hubei style. “Every year, my sister-in-law would bring us all the dry ingredients from Singapore, such as white and black fungus, dry lily flowers, soya bean curd, green bean vermicelli, because we couldn’t find them here. Even the way we prepared meats differed; the fish, for instance, would be served whole with eyes, fins and tail intact. Of course, it’s nothing like what you’d get in any Chinese restaurant,” says Yu.

With their numbers dwindling, thanks to migration mostly to Canada and the U.S., Chinese New Year today is mostly just house visits among the community. What hasn’t changed though, is their commitment to dentistry. With a steady stream of patients all day, Sen says that though they don’t work the hours their father did, there’s “enough for us to get by”. Sen’s nephew’s daughter too is now a dentist, taking the skill to the fourth generation. What do they love most about their job? “Making dentures. With the shortcuts my father taught us, we can get dentures done in a day. It gives me so much happiness to see patients, especially old ones, so pleased so quickly,” says Albert.

In their years in Chennai, Sen has returned to China once, at the turn of the millennium, for his father wanted to see his homeland once more. “It was a great experience to see my roots, but I would never consider moving back,” says Sen. “I could choose to migrate to Canada or Australia where my children are, but here my heart will always be.”

 

[ohmrlobalobayeh]

These Chinese couldn't even speak proper English and they're thinking about learning South Indian languages which are the hardest to differentiate from each other and have multiple dialects which differ from each district in the same state. Me being a Southie still find it very hard to learn other South Indian languages even after I am very familiar with them. Good luck with that

hahha these made me laughed so hard i choked on my saliva.

Why do you think so many voice software are used by indian call centres?

Lmao + rofl

 

[srshkmr]

well this is expected from China.But this is India