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llllllllllll | 11 years ago

I am not following much of what you're saying. I think you are deeply out of touch with what it is that linguists actually do -- this has nothing to do with the "needs of professional linguists".

If you don't standardize the language, then it evolves to become unpredictable, inconsistent and impossible for non-natives to learn without years of immersion.

Imagine if Ivy League universities used a complex idiosyncratic dialect

English and all other languages on the planet are idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and impossible to learn without years of immersion. You can try to prescribe away some surface irregularity ("the singular of data is datum!"), with maybe limited success among a small network of people, but that won't even make a dent in the overall complexity of a language.

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