I miss the good old days of surreal memes. Meme man and orang fighting against each other across an arbitrary and unpredictable universe, questioning the fabric of reality, surreality and irreality, all while striving to avoid eternal yamnation.
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.
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.
Slavic liquid metathesis moment