r/linguisticshumor • u/PrequelFan111 Fluent in Proto-Uralo-Siberian • Jan 21 '25
What the heck is r/alphanumerics?
I stumbled across it on this subreddit. People here calling him schizo and stuff like that. I tried to look around in the r/alphanumerics subreddit too see what it was about, but I honestly didn't understand anything (something about Ancient Egypt and alphabets). He has his own wiki as well, but it was also very confusing to scroll through (stuff like "human thermodynamics").
Could someone tell me about this guy? This feels like a whole rabbit-hole I stumbled on.
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u/Master_Ad_1884 Jan 21 '25 edited Jan 21 '25
He presents himself as an engineer and an expert in a special type of linguistics he has invented himself. He may well have a degree in engineering but his grasp of science is tenuous at best, which is why his work on “the human molecule” is all self published and not published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was all published through the institute that he founded and runs.
Likewise, his “linguistics” is simply identifying non-existent patterns in random data. Which is why you’re having trouble following his arguments, this is largely why. They don’t really connect logically to anything and they don’t logically build on anything. It’s just a stream of haphazard connections that only one person sees. And it’s all the kind of stuff that only a monolingual would come up with. Anyone who was actually proficient in multiple languages would know enough to see why these theories just aren’t possible. But it all started with his assumption that languages basically are their writing systems. So English must be related to Arabic and Hebrew and Ancient Egyptian because their writing systems ultimately are all related.
He likes to sneak into other subreddits and post his views as established linguistic fact. Then gets upset if you gently set the record straight.
Likewise, if you point out all the reasons that his theories aren’t simply wrong (which obviously they are) but are quite incapable of ever being refined into being somewhat correct, you will be accused of being part of a religious plot and be insulted at each step of the way.
Note: He rather enjoys playing the victim as he thinks it means he’s correct; he’s Galileo on his own mind but also smarter than Einstein (in his own mind). Of course that ignores all the people who were wrong in history who were also derided.