I mean, it does if you’re adding for a pen and get a pin. It’s on the speaker to make themselves understood, excepting disabilities. Are you saying being Australian is a disability?
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_Gandalf_the_Black_@feddit.de 7 months agoI mean, in Australian accents, pen and pin are pronounced the same. That doesn’t make their accent invalid.
db2@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
_Gandalf_the_Black_@feddit.de 7 months ago
So basically your argument is that an accent or dialect is only valid if it can be understood by people from outside that speech community? German and English both have the same linguistic origins, but they are not mutually intelligible. Does that make either or both invalid ways of speaking? Do you realise that phonological changes are a perfectly natural part of linguistic evolution and, given enough time, speakers of dialect X and dialect Y can stop being able to understand each other? Yes, you can code-switch to make yourself more understandable to speakers of another dialect, but that’s generally what you do when the differences between the two dialects are big enough that you feel the need to change the entire manner in which you speak.
db2@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
You sound like the kind of person who would go vacation in another country and complain about all the foreigners. I wouldn’t go to Germany speaking English and expect everyone to understand me, I’d bother to learn German so i could be understood. This isn’t a hard concept to understand here.
_Gandalf_the_Black_@feddit.de 7 months ago
What? How is that the conclusion you’re drawing here? As a side note, I have learnt and can speak German and have lived and studied in Germany. But more importantly, I feel like we’re having two entirely different conversations. My understanding of your argument is that it is invalid to put down potentially confusing pronunciation differences down to accents. Please correct me if I have misunderstood what you’re saying. My argument is that this is just a natural linguistic process and differing pronunciations even to the point of confusion between dialects is inevitable. If someone’s dialect/accent truly does cause communication problems, then a workaround needs to found, whether that’s rewording things so that confusion caused by pronunciation is averted, or by code-switching to a common dialect in more extreme cases. Neither of these invalidates either dialect or accent. People speak differently, and no matter how strange it might sound, it’s just something you have to get over.
ryannathans@aussie.zone 7 months ago
Not here, maybe NZ
_Gandalf_the_Black_@feddit.de 7 months ago
Okay, I looked it up, and it seems I was getting confused with the Australian weak vowel merger; the pin/pen merger is actually in some American accents