https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/that

That refers primarily to people or things; which refers primarily to things, and who refers primarily to people. Some authorities insist who/whom be used when making reference to people, but others, such as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, write that such prescriptions are “without foundation” and use of that in such positions is common and “entirely standard”.[2] Hence, one sees both “he is the man who invented the telephone” and “he is the man that invented the telephone.”

Dormant Don

I prefer eleventyleven

лишишь

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: >:(

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about salvaging a toaster that you’ve accidentally got cheese in and can’t use anymore.

As long as it’s a small amount of cheese, you can salvage the situation (having learned your lesson not to toast sandwiches in the toaster). Make sure the room is well-ventilated and you don’t do this directly under a smoke detector: turn the toaster on for a couple of seconds at a time so the cheese that’s stuck burns a bit, waiting until it stops smoking and then repeating so that it never catches fire or starts smoking out of control, until eventually the toaster can run without smoking.

We call them “toe-dippers” - people who turn up with no desire to actually get involved with the community and just post random memes with no relation to the topic of the server