[jackfoxy]

Nope. You have not convinced me a top down authority for the English language is necessary of even desirable. I call this approach the engineer's fallacy of seeing something messy and wanting to engineer it right away.

I do occasionally cringe at changes to English driven by the great influx of non-native speakers and lack of education of even the native speakers, my favorite being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

But hey, it's all good. This is how culture changes language. It's a living dynamic.

[cartoonfoxes]

Notably, subsets of English are already standardized in domains where this would be useful. For example, Aviation English and Simplified Technical English, maintained by the ICAO and ASD respectively. This approach whereby a language is only "standardized" for use in a specific domain makes sense to me.

[hnick]

I like to consider English in the same class is loosely typed dynamic programming languages... Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc. They get popular because the lack of strictness makes them easy to work with and they spread like... well, some would say a disease ;)

The lack of strictness in English means you can say something wrong but intelligible very easily, so we all get by.

[qsort]

This is also the default positions of most (almost all) linguists. You don't get to tell a dog what counts as barking.

[LudwigNagasena]

People aren’t dogs and they may desire a unified standard that simplifies communication.

By the way, it shouldn’t matter at all what a linguist thinks about that unless it is literally his field of expertise. And political sociolinguistics is not a field of expertise of most linguists.

[qsort]

> People aren’t dogs and they may desire a unified standard that simplifies communication.

Yeah but do they? It doesn't seem to me like a standard of this kind is anywhere near a priority for anybody. I'm not even a native speaker and I never felt the need of it. Why are we trying to fix something that's clearly not broken?

[SilasX]

This. Just because it's not expert group X's job to study Y, doesn't mean Y is unimportant or can be ignored.

[porknubbins]

Isn’t begging the question just a confusing mistranslation anyway? People without some serious training are not usually good at spotting logical fallacies much less categories of argument.

[hnick]

I always interpreted it as an elision. Something like "But that begs [me to ask] the question why XYZ".

[dan-robertson]

So in some sense that is what begging the question means because it’s what people usually mean when they say the phrase, and there is no central body to fix the meaning of English phrases and complain when they are wrong.

Traditionally, begging the question is the logical fallacy of assuming the consequent: proving that something is true conditionally on the fact that it is true and then deducing that it is true.

It is a mistranslation because it’s origin is a poor translation of assuming as begging and the consequent as the question.

On the other hand any direct translation (and initially translations were direct translations through several languages which is worse) of any early works of philosophy or logic (say Plato) will have this problem as the vocabulary Plato had to use just didn’t already have words for all the things in logic and philosophy that we now have words for.