the conlang on shortwave 4625 kHz

There is a numbers station designated S06s by enthusiasts. Russian-speaking woman, mechanical cadence, five-figure groups. It has been broadcasting since at least 1996. Most of its transmissions are unremarkable in the sense that all numbers stations are unremarkable. A header. A count. A message. A repeat. A null.

I am not interested in S06s.

I am interested in what someone recorded over the top of it on 4625 kHz on the night of 2014-11-09, between 23:47 and 23:54 UTC, while S06s was off the air. The recording is on the Priyom forums, uploaded by a user called sigint_b in 2015 and not commented on since. The file is a seven-minute capture. The first thirty seconds are static. The rest is a woman reading what is not numbers and not Russian.

The phonemes are consistent. I sat with the file and a notepad for two evenings and built an inventory. Fourteen consonants. Five vowels. No clusters longer than CC. Stress falls on the penult except when it doesn't, and when it doesn't it falls on a syllable that contains one specific vowel I have transcribed as /ɨ/. The syllable structure tolerates final nasals but not final stops.

She reads in groups. The groups are not five. The groups are seven. I counted them four times.

The intonation contour at the end of each group is flat. Not falling, which would mark a statement in most languages. Not rising. Flat. The same pitch as the rest of the group. She does not breathe between groups. She breathes between sets of groups, and the sets are also seven.

I tried to find a base form. There is a recurring trisyllable that opens roughly one group in nine. /ka.lɛn.da/. I wrote it down before I noticed I had written it down.

There is no header. There is no null. There is no repeat. At 23:54:11 the woman stops mid-group, the carrier holds for nine seconds, and S06s comes back on frequency at 23:54:20 with its standard test tone as if nothing had been there.

The Priyom database has no entry for a 2014-11-09 interruption. The logs for that night show S06s active from 23:00 to 00:00 with no gap.

sigint_b's account has one upload and no posts. The IP is logged as a university netblock in Kraków.

I downloaded the file. I made a second copy. I have listened to it through twice, once with headphones and once without, and the second time I noticed that the breaths between sets are not breaths. They are the same length every time. 1.4 seconds. Count them again. They are.