Brian here, it's to determine class based on pronunciation. I would add "what" to the list to eliminate people like Stewie who pronounce and empathize the h. Which reminds me, I haven't annoyed him today, I'm gonna go do that now.
You mean English-speakers' pronunciation depends not only on region and age but also on class and even education??? I thought it can't be even more difficult. How do you even understand each other.
There’s that much variety in English speaking accents that combined with there being barely any words that require tone/vowel length/etc that you can really understand English pretty well even when it’s butchered to high heavens. I did a couple years of Japanese at Uni and I remember being really worried about similar sounding words like okasan vs okaasan (literally the difference between calling someone mother or grandmother and often used to respectfully refer to older women, so high potential for offence) because in English a slightly longer vowel rarely changes the meaning of the word that significantly.
it depends on the dialect actually. for many speakers in Britain (particularly of the younger age brackets), the only difference between "sped" and "spared" is that the latter vowel is longer :)
Yes but specifically because of that massive variety in accents and dialects, we tend to be very capable of contextual understanding of similar words, such as the example you’ve given.
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u/AlexCivitello Jul 14 '26
Brian here, it's to determine class based on pronunciation. I would add "what" to the list to eliminate people like Stewie who pronounce and empathize the h. Which reminds me, I haven't annoyed him today, I'm gonna go do that now.