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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

You are reading something into my comment that wasn't there in order to pick a boring fight. There is of course no such thing as no accent a priori, but there is such a thing as "accents understood by (vastly) more people" and "accents closer to the mean accent of native speakers". When I learn Russian, my English accent is not on the same footing as a Muscovite's; the intended notion of "de-accenting" the English accent on my Russian is obvious.

Consider responding to the substance of the comment instead.

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> accents closer to the mean accent of native speakers

Notice that, for the case of English, most speakers are not native, by a huge margin! Native English speakers are a biased minority, and with a lot of variation within. Not sure that an "average native" accent is a useful concept at all. I, for one, tend to find most non-native English speakers vastly easier to understand than many native speakers.

This is a dumb fight to pick. Dude just wants some ML software to figure out how to change accents.

Maybe he wants to change the accent to a Texas accent, or the Queen's english, who cares, it's the ML part that's interesting.

> Notice that, for the case of English, most speakers are not native, by a huge margin!

I'm well aware, and this does not rebut any of my points.

> I, for one, tend to find most non-native English speakers vastly easier to understand than many native speakers.

That "many" native speakers in a language of hundreds of millions of speakers are hard to understand does not challenge the claim that a non-native accent brought closer to any native accent, much less the mean native accent, will for the large majority if listeners be easier rather than harder to understand.

What is the "mean native accent" for English? Would it be possible to somehow synthesise that? I'd love to hear what it sounds like!

I responded to the part of the comment that I had a response to, and I didn't mean any kind of hostility, much less to pick any kind of fight.

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