#languagehat

First, I'll point out the length: almost 2k comments! LH comment threads can be quite long and meandering (and the cool thing is its totally acceptable to start posting on them years later & revive the thread; it's like Tumblr!) but that usually means dozens to hundreds of comments. I've only found two threads that that clear four digits, and this one is BY FAR the longest.

At first it's the usual pleasant meanderings of the regulars, but since the topic of this one is "The Indo-European Controversy" cranks soon appear. (I swear, *nothing* gets cranks to show up in your comment sections like Proto-Indo-European!)

First we get some guy trying to suggest that PIE originated in North America. Which, maybe *slightly* less crazy than it sounds given that we're* all bullish on Dene-Yeniseian here, but Na-Dene languages are (mostly) in the close-to-Asia corner of the continent... this guy's just picking languages at random through the continent and pointing at single-word similarities. hmmm)

Anyways his proposals failed to convince the regulars (to say the least) but we got some pretty good jokes out of his nonsense sound-change proposals:

LMAO

Anyways, that's all good fun, but at the start of it, someone mentioned a blogger called German Dziebel. This name means nothing to me, but it turned out to be an omen of things to come.

Eventually the guy himself shows up in the thread, to chime in withe support for the North American-PIE hypothesis, even double-down on it with claims that genetic evidence supports a back migration from N. America to Eurasia. (It doesn't.) He also wants to completely overturn mainstream PIE root reconstruction and brings his own new cognate sets to the efforts. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; well, German Dziebel certain provides extraordinary obduracy.

He eventually gets banned for insulting the other commenters, particularly for his strident insistence that only blogging under your real name is valid and all the pseudonymous commenters are trolls.

German Dziebel posted maybe 90 comments before getting banned; we're only about a quarter of the way through the thread now. What really makes this thread go the distance is about a week later when Vladimir Diakoff enters the thread. He positions himself as an interested amateur and support of Dziebel (though he says Dziebel doesn't return his emails), and he's here to further explain (his understanding) of Diakoff's PIE reconstruction proposals and also proposal a few of his own. He's (mostly) much friendly than Dziebel and he Will. Not. Stop. Posting.

This lasts from late November 2015 through late March 2016, when languagehat's host finally persuades some of the other comments to set up a separate blog to discuss Diakoff's proposals. By my count Diakoff racked up almost 500 comments; between him and the people arguing with him we're now more than 90% through the thread. Conversation on the original thread meanders from there, dying down across spring of 2016 with a few resurgences in 2018 and 2019.

And then, in 2023:

Those links: Vladimir Diakoff's proposals (on that blog the other commenters set up for him) and German Dziebel's paper.

I'm afraid of academia.edu so all I can tell you is that the titles seem to match. But if TR and the followup comments are correct that means either:

German Dziebel finally started reading Vladimir Diakoff's emails, and wrote a paper based on his ideas, without listing Diakoff as a co-author (maybe he's in the acknowledgements?)

to be honest, I didn't understand this one (the issue probably stems from the abstruse jargon, tbf) -- but lol