Talk:Nostratic languages

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Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 00:36, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Time to bring this article in line with scholarly consensus

This entire article is presenting a fringe theory with almost no academic acceptance as a serious proposal. There are a huge number of self-published articles by non-experts referenced in the article. I've taken an absolute hatchet to the original research of this article and cleared up as many references to sources which do not meet Wikipedia's standards. It is possible that Bomhard may warrant a mention in here, but as a prominent figure rather than a source of information, though I am not plugged into the fringes of historical linguistics enough to know how important his contributions are. Nonetheless, I encourage other linguists to keep an eye on this and keep working on cleaning it up, as it absolutely appears to have been suffering from a bit of an issue wikipedia's policies around fringe. Specifically WP:NFRINGE:

The notability of a fringe theory must be judged by statements from verifiable and reliable sources, not the proclamations of its adherents. Additionally, the topic must satisfy general notability guidelines: the topic must receive significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.

Warrenmck (talk) 23:54, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

This article has been carelessly edited by people who appear to have only a superficial understanding of the details of the Nostratic Theory. The use of terms such as "fringe theory" do not belong in a serious encyclopedia article. The original article was far superior and far more accurate, and I urge that it be restored. Arbomhard (talk) 01:56, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

"This article has been carelessly edited by people who appear to have only a superficial understanding of the details of the Nostratic Theory."

Many of the edits are being made by historical linguists and those intimately familiar with the field and its evidentiary standards. This is a bit of a nuanced topic for the average wikipedian to want to engage with. There's no need for an assumption of bad faith.

"The original article was far superior and far more accurate, and I urge that it be restored."

If there's specific changes you believe should be made then by all means, suggest them and they can be reviewed by people knowledgable on the topic and included if appropriate. There was a wider discussion on the linguistics wikiproject in which there was a general agreement that fringe theories should not have in-universe evidence presented as if it's credible or taken seriously unless there is a credible and accepted scholarly source on the topic saying the same thing. It isn't my intention to attack any of your edits in any way, but the truth is that at present Nostratic is functionally wholly rejected by mainstream linguists and the article on Wikipedia should reflect that case. Please see the essay WP:ADVOCACY and familiarize yourself with WP:RS, WP:PARITY, and WP:COI. Warrenmck (talk) 02:37, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

"Proto-Nostratic" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Proto-Nostratic has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 September 16 § Proto-Nostratic until a consensus is reached. – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 21:22, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Errors

Warren: Please restore the original version of this article. The current version contains errors. Thanks. Arbomhard (talk) 16:37, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

@Arbomhard What errors? If you can provide credible, widely accepted sources that meet Wikipedia’s standards for inclusion I’d be happy to help you work on improving the article. Restoring the old version isn’t happening, per WP:PROFRINGE. Warrenmck (talk) 16:31, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, Warren, I do not mean to be rude, but you do not appear to have the requisite academic or professional credentials to be making the edits to this and several other Wikipedia articles. If I am mistaken here, please provide proof to the contrary. Being an outsider, you do not have a clear understanding of the dynamics involved. Again, you are trying to throw up meaningless procedural roadblocks instead of approaching the matter objectively and cooperatively. The current version is both incomplete and contains errors. I am probably one of the few people in the world who is qualified to make this statement. The original version of the entry on Nostratic was far superior and should be restored. Thank you. Arbomhard (talk) 16:16, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

By "outsider" do you mean not a Nostraticist? —Tamfang (talk) 06:59, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

Warren: The statement "the truth is that at present Nostratic is functionally wholly rejected by mainstream linguists and the article on Wikipedia should reflect that case" is a bit extreme, to say the least, though it does apply, for the most part, to the work of Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky. The truth is far more nuanced. Please stop pontificating, please stop expressing your biased personal opinions, and familiarize yourself with the facts. You can start, for example, by reading the reviews of my own work on the topic posted on academia.edu. You will see that these reviews range from enthusiastic support (Igor M. Diakonoff) to criticism (Eugene Helimski) to everything between these two poles -- all from "mainstream linguists". I have included everything, even when it was less than complimentary. I have also prepared detailed reviews of the work of Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky, which are really required reading -- you can also download these reviews from academia.edu. For one thing, these reviews will give you a better understanding of the dynamics involved. And, just for fun, read the review of my book Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic on amazon.com. And, for goodness sakes, read and seriously ponder the previous comments made by other Wikipedia contributors. Some of them make very valid points. Arbomhard (talk) 17:43, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Warren: Let me have the courtesy of answering one of your questions: "what errors?" As already pointed out, you have the habit of presenting your personal opinions, your personal interpretations, your personal value judgments, as though they were incontroverttble facts, compounded by you intentionally leaving out critical information. You have also quoted out of context. This gives a very biased picture and is, in my opinion, reprehensible. Not only does this reflect badly on you, it undermines the value of Wikipedia as a reliable resource. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arbomhard (talk • contribs) 07:17, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

This paragraph does not help bystanders know which assertions are biased. —Tamfang (talk) 07:02, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

Bomhard's Exile

I've been keeping tabs on Nostratic linguistics for a while now, along with the situation here on Wikipedia with Bomhard's disrespectful removal from the page along with the further disrespect here in the talk page. I don't know which outdated 50's scholarly consensus the people here follow, but Bomhard's work is the most up-to-date material that we have on Proto-Nostratic. I don't know what personal issue the people here have with Bomhard, but he's the next name up after Pedersen, Illich-Svitych, and Dolgopolsky whether you like it or not. That's just how the business of reconstruction goes.

Also, before I get basement residents jumping all over me, don't think I'm making any sort of claim that Proto-Nostratic exists or is viable to reconstruct. I personally am not convinced yet, but I'd love to see more work put into it and maybe one day it'll have its big breakthrough of undeniability like Proto-Indo-European. That's how science works. Keep resisting progress and you're going to be stuck in caveman days like the speakers of Proto-Nostratic ;).

Any way, I support having paragraphs on this article stressing that Proto-Nostratic is not widely accepted, but I ask: what is the purpose of this article? If the purpose of this article is to explain that Nostratic linguistics is incorrect, harmful to society, dangerous, etc., it needs to be restructured and titled accordingly to completely disregard everything. No mention of its details, grammar, phonology, etc. If the purpose of this article is, as it should be, to explain what Proto-Nostratic is, Bomhard's work needs to be reincluded.

Why? If Bomhard is going to be removed because he is "not widely accepted", then all of the work that has been done before him needs to be removed because it is just as fringe. Not only fringe, but outdated fringe. So, reinstate Bomhard's work or completely reframe the article to totally disregard Nostratic linguistics. That is the ultimatum here from a perspective of reason. Not Pro-Bomhard or Anti-Bomhard, not Pro-Nostratic or Anti-Nostratic, but pro-reason.

I won't be making any changes to the article myself though. Introducing reason into the talk page is all I'm able to do. I don't have the time to edit-war against the kinds of people who get upset over theoretical linguistics like their lives depend on it. Hrabnaz (talk) 22:05, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

It's funny that there are no citations to Bomhard, but the phylogenetic tree is based on the work of... you guessed it... Allan R. Bomhard! I suppose that'll be gone by tomorrow.  Tewdar  22:41, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

If the purpose of this article is, as it should be, to explain what Proto-Nostratic is, Bomhard's work needs to be reincluded - definitely agree with this. You cannot possibly write a comprehensive article about Nostratic without including Bomhard's work, along with all the criticism of that work.  Tewdar  08:12, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Agree, the purges last year were way over the top. A fair mention of his work based on secondary sources won't violate WP:UNDUE; and we should not hesitiate to cite mentions in "Moscow school" publications even if some might shout "in-universe!". But we shouldn't have excessive details about Bomhard's reconstructions based on primary sources alone. It's not so much a matter of the publication venue of his more recent works (WP:SELFPUB tells us what to do in such instances), but WP's status as a tertiary source. If there is no secondary source that reproduces massive tables of phonological and morphological reconstructions, why should we include them? –Austronesier (talk) 17:54, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

We could probably drag some more out of Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence, couldn't we? There are 60+ mentions of Bomhard's name in this book (including a chapter by Bomhard).  Tewdar  18:33, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Not sure, that's from a time when talking Nostratics was still quite a fad. We are a bit wiser now; the hype is gone.

I've tried to find more recent citations (from 2015 onwards) of Bomhard's work (both the De Gruyter and Brill volumes, and his self-published work-in-progress), which are actually not easy to find beyond a passing mention. This article[1] struck me as odd. It is written by a non-expert (a geographer) who at several points buys into the stock straw arguments of Nostracists about "traditionalists" (what's "traditional" about not being sloppy and confirmation-biased?) when they face opposition from colleagues who demand rigidly established evidence. I don't recommend to use the paper here, it's just an interesting find. I still prefer reviews from actual linguists regardless of which "school" or "camp" they belong to. –Austronesier (talk) 19:06, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

There's Nostratic: Examining a linguistic macrofamily too, which is in the bibliography but doesn't seem to be used as far as I can see. Also very old though. Thanks for the link.  Tewdar  19:25, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Pre-Indo-European by Winfred Lehmann (2002) has references to Bomhard and his contributions. Hrabnaz (talk) 21:36, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

As the person behind the purge: I'm very open to agreeing with @Austronesier that my hatchet job may have gone too far (though I also left the tree in which mentioned him, I wasn't trying to purge mentions of Bomhard from existence), and when I saw this last night I decided best for me not to weigh in. The reason my edits were heavy handed largely had to do with WP:COI (see below) WP:PARITY and WP:RS; a huge amount of what was cited here were self-published.

Here's the entire reference list from before I took a hatchet to it:

• Bomhard, Allan R., and John C. Kerns (1994). The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship. Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-013900-6
• Bomhard, Allan R. (1996). Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis. Signum Publishers.
• Bomhard, Allan R. (2008). Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, 2 volumes. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-16853-4
• Bomhard, Allan R. (2008). A Critical Review of Dolgopolsky's Nostratic Dictionary.
• Bomhard, Allan R. (2008). The Glottalic Theory of Proto-Indo-European and Consonantism and Its Implications for Nostratic Sound Correspondences. Mother Tongue.
• Bomhard, Allan R. (2011). The Nostratic Hypothesis in 2011: Trends and Issues. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. ISBN (paperback) 978-0-9845383-0-0
• Bomhard, Allan R. (2018). A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics: With Special Reference to Indo-European. Four volumes, 2,807 pages, combined into a single PDF; published as an open-access book under a Creative Commons license.
• Bomhard, Allan R., (December 2020). A Critical Review of Illič-Svityč's Nostratic Dictionary. Published as an open-access book under a Creative Commons license.

Of those, we see:

• The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship Academic press
• Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis. Signum Publishers. Vanity press
• Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, 2 volumes. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-16853-4 Academic press
• A Critical Review of Dolgopolsky's Nostratic Dictionary] Self published
• The Glottalic Theory of Proto-Indo-European and Consonantism and Its Implications for Nostratic Sound Correspondences Published in Mother Tongue, which I fully confess to being confused by the status of. It looks like a real though meaningless impact journal for fringe theories with an editor with a hotmail address, but I have no idea how this interacts with WP:RS and think that someone more familiar with it than I would need to cover that.
• The Nostratic Hypothesis in 2011: Trends and Issues Published by the D.C.-based "Institute for the Study of Man", which appears to be the parent publisher of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, which... seems to have substantial issues (see the journal page).
• A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics: With Special Reference to Indo-European Self published
• A Critical Review of Illič-Svityč's Nostratic Dictionary Self published

Like I said, I'll take a step back and also acknowledge that my edits were heavy handed. However, I struggle to see Bomhard as more than an incredibly prolific crank. Nostratic at present is a fringe theory, but it does have some academic proponents. Bomhard does not appear to be one of them, rather he's an extremely passionate hobbyist as far as I've been able to discern. Clearly he has a footprint in historical linguistics which is likely too big to ignore, but my personal take is we should be restricting Bomhard's contributions here to those which were discussed or published in reliable sources by relevant scholars.

There are also concerns that the person in question has directly engaged in an editing campaign on Wikipedia to add citations to his work everywhere it's possibly relevant, including many of the citations we're talking about here, so please keep in mind my hatchet job was largely due to a massive WP:COI issue with Bomhard cites in this article. Taking his contributions directly as they are presented when they're very very clearly WP:PROFRINGE from a self-styled scholar of Nostratic who lacks any qualification on the topic beyond being prolific seems to be doing wikipedia a disservice.

Obviously I'm not unbiased here, so like I said, I'm happy to step back and let those who are been less burned out on this whole specific issue on Wikipedia to handle this one, but I thought making my reasoning more known here might be valuable.

I also feel it might be worth a footnote that I have nothing against and a lot of respect for independent scholars, I just think there's a difference between, say, a serious independent scholar working with the tools of a field on the periphery and someone who just sticks to their guns and doesn't engage with the wider community of scholarship on their chosen topic of interest. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 23:53, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Reopen the dialog

The recently revised Wikipedia entry on Nostratic is both incomplete and biased. As such, it violates Wikipedia’s policy of impartiality. It is incomplete (1) in that it ignores many early and contemporary researchers who have contributed to Nostratic studies, either as a whole or partially. Missing early scholars include, to name the most prominent: Franz Bopp (Indo-European and Kartvelian); Graziadio Ascoli (Indo-European and Semitic); Vilhelm Thomsen (Indo-European and Finno-Ugrian); Hermann Möller (Indo-European and Semitic). Missing contemporary researchers include, again, to name the most prominent: Václav Blážek (Nostratic); Panu Hakola (Indo-European and Uralic); Kalevi Koskinen (Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, Altaic); Björn Collinder (Indo-European and Uralic); Frederik Kortlandt (Indo-European and Uralic); Michael Fortescue (Eurasiatc); Allan Bomhard (Nostratic); Linus Brunner (Indo-European and Semitic). It is incomplete (2) in that there is no real discussion of sound correspondences and the proposed reconstructed phonological system of the Nostratic proto-language. It is incomplete (3) in that there is no meaningful discussion of Proto-Nostratic root structure patterning, inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, lexicon, and syntax. Also missing is (4) any discussion of homelands and migrations.

It is biased in that it is strongly focused on Russian contributions to Nostratic – indeed, so much so that the role of non-Russians is either downplayer or ignored altogether. This leads me to suspect that the current revision was written by a Russian scholar using a pseudonym to hide his true identity. There is a fairly transparent agenda here, namely, to promote one particular version of Nostratic (that proposed by Illič-Svityč and Dolgopolsky) over other versions. Another clue here is the writer’s focus on Wikipedia entries dealing with distant linguistic relationship in general, again, with the primary focus on highlighting and promoting Russian scholarship. The study of distant linguistic relationship has long been a favorite objective of Russian research. This focus on Russian scholarship violates Wikipedia’s policy of impartiality.

As an afterthought, it may be noted that the same person recently revised the Wikipedia biographical entry for Allan Bomhard. That revised entry suffers from many of the same faults noted above, and, consequently, it also violates Wikipedia’s policy of impartiality. Indeed, as rewritten, this biographical entry is both derogatory and condescending. Arbomhard (talk) 12:21, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Did e.g. Vilhelm Thomsen write about Nostratic? I'm no expert, but it seems to me that while he wrote about language relationships that are part of the basis for Nostratic theories (originated by his student Holger Pedersen), this does not imply that his work should be prominent in an article on Nostratic. Same may go for others user:Arbomhard mention. In other words, an article on Nostratic should be about theories labelling a (speculative) language family "Nostratic", not about all work or speculation on macro families. - I have no idea if it is true that the article gives undue weight to Russian linguists, though. Nø (talk) 13:46, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your observations. You are correct - Thomsen (and several of the others mentioned) wrote on parts of Nostratic, and I note which parts in my posting. In other words, they laid the foundation for future work. As you note, Pedersen was the first to see the bigger picture, and it was he who suggested the name "Nostratian" (= "Nostratic"). I believe the others should be mentioned in passing as early pioneers. On another note, yes, the article does give undo weight to Russian linguists. Indeed, that is a telltale sign that bias is at work here. 2603:6080:7200:BD6D:9DB7:7F2C:DF6A:83C1 (talk) 20:59, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

No one should downplay or denigrate the important contribution that the Ukrainian-born scholar Illič-Svityč or the Russian-Israeli scholar Dolgopolsky made to Nostratic studies. Indeed, Dolgopolsky was a personal friend of mine and came to my home several times when he was in Boston visiting his daughter, who also lived there. Modern Nostratic studies really began with these two gentlemen. Pedersen had the vision and laid the foundation in broad outline, but it was Illič-Svityč and Dolgopolsky who did the actual research, and they should be given due credit for their accomplishments. However, their work is not without major problems (see my reviews of their work available for free download on academia.edu as well as reviews by several other prominent linguists), and they are not the only scholars who have since made important contributions to the study of the Nostratic macrofamily. 2603:6080:7200:BD6D:5497:521E:28C5:6CC4 (talk) 06:30, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

@Arbomhard - If you believe that the Allan R. Bomhard article violates Wikipedia’s policy of impartiality because it is derogatory and condescending, you can report it to the Biographies of living persons noticeboard.  Tewdar  15:13, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

@Tewdar the current state of Allan R. Bomhard actually results from a BPLN discussion and an ANI, which put lots of eyes on it. This probably isn't a fruitful line of discussion for the user in question, since it's been made clear to them several times that the version they want won't fly on Wikipedia. Same issue with their self-published work on Nostratic in this article here being excised per WP:RS. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 12:41, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

I really don't want to spend much time on Wikipedia's talk pages, but one of the first problems I see is Among Nostratists [sic], he has been described as "a maximalist who casts his nets as widely as possible", sourced to this article in Mosaic magazine, "an online magazine of Jewish ideas, religion, politics, and culture" written by one 'PHILOLOGOS' aka Hillel Halkin. Is Halkin a Nostraticist? Is Mosaic magazine a good source for this claim? Should this statement be in the lead, in its current form? I'm leaning 'not really'.  Tewdar  13:18, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

That was, I believe, added by @David Eppstein, so you can ask him. You're going to need to find a way to refer to Bomhard's status as a fringe theorist in some capacity in the lede or there's not much point in an article about Bomhard in the first place. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 13:22, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

The previous sentence is The theory is widely rejected by mainstream linguists as a fringe theory, so we already got that covered.  Tewdar  13:28, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, but one of the foremost fringe theorists of this topic is Bomhard, to the point that that is his only notability. He's not an academic, he has no formal training in the topic (that I'm aware of, and he has declined previously to provide any sources on that topic that we can include on the page), his publication history is almost exclusively self-published, and none of his work has had any acceptance at all in mainstream linguistics. Without the fringe theory aspect Bomhard fails WP:N, and thus it certainly belongs in some capacity in the lede. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 13:32, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

@Warren, the complete absence of any mention of Bomhard's work in this article does not align well with how the real world talks about Nostratic. And I'm talking about academic scholarship. Take Stefan Georg's chapter "Connections between Uralic and other language families" in the Routledge handbook The Uralic Languages. At the risk of boring you by citing from this chapter again, here's what Georg writes:

The Nostratic hypothesis is mainly defended by Illič-Svityč and his followers (the ‘Moscow school’ of comparative linguistics, cf. Illič-Svityč 1971–86). A somewhat independent position is occupied by Dolgopolsky (e.g. 1998), and a third approach, with, by and large, the same input languages, but with different etymologies and correspondences, is presented by Bomhard in a series of books, for example, Bomhard (2008).

So essentially in one breath with Illič-Svityč and Dolgopolsky. And this is not the only instance of Bomhard being mentioned in a high-quality handbook. Here is a quote from "More remote relationships of Proto-Indo-European" by Petri Kallio & Jorma Koivulehto in the 3rd volume of DeGruyter's Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics that goes into more detail in assessing the merits of the three main schools of thought. After a complete paragraph devoted to Illič-Svityč and the Moscow School, they write:

Outside the Moscow school, however, there have been some scholars ready to renew the Nostratic hypothesis. They even include Illič-Svityč’s original co-founder of the hypothesis, Aron Dolgopolsky, who left the Soviet Union for Israel in the mid-1970s and has since advanced the Moscow-school views although quantitatively rather than qualitatively (see e.g. Dolgopolsky 1998). Still, the only truly dissident contemporary Nostraticist is Allan R. Bomhard, whose Proto-Nostratic reconstructions are entirely different from those of others, due to the fact that he does take the Indo-European laryngeal and even glottalic theories into account (see e.g. Bomhard and Kerns 1994; Bomhard 1996). Unfortunately, his treatment of most other language families leaves much to be desired, and his works in general must be considered both empirically and methodologically inferior to those of Illič-Svityč (whose works, too, include errors in linguistic data, apparent to specialists in each language family involved).

While not really flattering, this is clear evidence that the academic world is aware of Bomhard's work, engages with it and gives him due space (i.e. ranging from a half-sentence to two sentences) in discussions of the Nostratic hypothesis.

Wikipedia follows the best sources. While I'm entirely with you in barring any kind of content based on primary sources from articles about controversial long-range proposals, we should not take an insular position (by mentioning Illič-Svityč, Dolgopolsky, but not Bomhard) against sources such as the two cited above, only because of considerations about the channels that Bomhard has chosen for publishing his work in the last 15 years or so, after having published books with John Benjamins, De Gruyter and Brill. We won't cite from these sources directly, anyway.

NB this is only about the lack of any mention of Bomhard in this article. I have little interest in the BLP, but we have hundreds of articles about mediocre tenure academics that are entirely based on institutional CV pages, so I don't worry too much about WP having an article about Bomhard. But that's a different story. –Austronesier (talk) 20:44, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

the complete absence of any mention of Bomhard's work in this article does not align well with how the real world talks about Nostratic.

Just a quick comment, but I agreed in the thread from a few months ago above that my removal was heavy handed and I was perfecly open to some being added back in. Obviously there's some serious work out of Bomhard, but he was heavily involved with editing this article and a lot was conflated between his self published work and the work that got an academic printing.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying here at all, other than to point out that it's been very tricky to figure out how to mention it without ascribing it undue weight. Also, there is an issue still in that he is one of the foremost fringe theorists on the topic, academic coverage or not. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 21:02, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

@Arbomhard if you're going to obliquely complain about a specific editor, you should make sure to ping them so they can respond. Since context makes it pretty clear this is about me (from the comments on editing the Allan R. Bomhard article and here and the long-range editing history) I should point out that in your rush to see conspiracy theories that 1: I'm a real-name editor who is very clearly not a Russian linguist and my user page, in fact, contained a description of my current editing goals on Wikipedia which stated:

# Try to not overstate the influence of Russian school of linguistics without minimizing their contributions to linguistics

And if you look at my actual contributions on these articles it's been to remove that content where it's overweighted. You've already been through BLPN for the Allan R. Bomhard article, which resulted in a form you didn't like that isn't going to change unless you've got more to bring than not liking it, and an ANI for your COI editing here. And even after that ANI I wouldn't be shocked to learn that the IP edit to remove the fringe theory tag without comment was you, since you've admitted to editing logged out and scrambling your IP. I wouldn't necessarily consider this a fruitful line of discussion where your primary reasoning seems to be seeing that people are out to get you rather than there just... not being any scholarly acceptance for this particular fringe theory.

If you have substantive, sourced points to add to this then by all means, provide those and we can look at adding them in. You've done that in the past effectively, so that's probably the best approach here. It's also worth reminding you that you've been warned for your personal attacks here, which your continued accusations aimed at other editors are most certainly doing. Your behaviour here already is directly counter to your acknowledgement of out-of-line behaviour at the last ANI. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 13:04, 29 December 2024 (UTC)