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I feel like the Green Dragon probably did pretty well when the Hobbits returned after a long journey. But I’d call that a pub rather than a bar.

All I did was give Bilbo a nudge out of the door and Frodo a ring that I suspected could possibly be an ancient Ring of Power™ forged by the Dark Lord Sauron, into which he poured his cruelty, malice, and his will to dominate all life.

I’m English and I don’t either. It’s a pretty obvious hangover of British imperial pretensions.

The term British Isles is, of course, disputed by the Irish.

AfDler in Germany

Yeah, I think it’s all about context. If it’s just part of a personal project or something you’re sharing with a few friends, it’s a useful tool. If it’s being presented as real art or even used commercially, that’s when the issues start coming up.

Gandalf the White

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

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.

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.

Also accents are not people “choosing” to speak another way. It’s just a result of linguistic change.

I mean, in Australian accents, pen and pin are pronounced the same. That doesn’t make their accent invalid.

People when they find out different accents exist: >:(

Oh, so you mean the whole of the contemporary field of linguistics?

However, real grammar and prescribed textbook grammar are two different things.

Last March (of the Ents)

Waters tastes gross

For the record, I’m a committed hydro-homie and do not endorse this message.

It’s the toast that makes you happy

Tja