US cancer patient developed 'uncontrollable' Irish accent

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64671894

by doener • 3 years ago

25 25 3 years ago

maxbaines• 3 years ago

I have a friend who had a head injury whilst playing rugby, following it he developed a South African accent, took a lot of time and effort to overcome it.

Mad_as_a_hatter• 3 years ago

Reminds me of this short movie! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cH-yDRPnbOM

captainmuon2• 3 years ago

Makes me wonder if accents are not just random assortments of pronunciation rules, but if there is a biological basis. Linguistic features map to neurological features. E.g. if you grow up speaking a certain dialect with a rolling r, there is a little circuit for that that gets excercised. And if you don't distinguish between certain vowels, your hardware for that remains underdeveloped. That would explain why accents are consistent: There are rhotic and non rhotic accents but AFAIK none where half of the words are like this and the other half like that.

Now that I think about it, it is almost certainly true. But it's probably controversial because different dialects are valued differently, and in a way you would be saying ha your funny "dialect X" is just "dialect Y" with a deficit here and an overtraining there. E.g. for the Germans, if a German speaker suddenly had trouble with final consonants, r, and mumbled sh tones they would sound like a speaker from Hesse (no offense :-P).

I wonder what features you'd have to loose / gain to turn an English accent into Irish?

gxt• 3 years ago

Absolutely not. Talk with second generation immigrants.

snowpid• 3 years ago

what is absolutely not?

bkfunk2• 3 years ago

“Biological” does not mean “genetic”. I believe parent is musing whether there is a neurodevelopmental basis, which of course there is, by all evidence; if you do not hear certain sounds by a young age, you will never be able to speak a language using those sounds with an accent indistinguishable from that of a native speaker. Obviously there is, indeed, a neurological component to that phenomenon.

In the US, the “Irish accent” (scare quotes because there is of course no single accent of Ireland) is fairly well known (that is, watching American TV and movies, you encounter Irish native English speakers more than, say, South African English speakers). And in TFA it says the patient in question lives in England, where of course there is even more exposure to Irish accents.

There must be, I posit, some circuitry that can interpret the phonemes of differently accented English and translate them into whatever latent representation of words or concepts is used for thought and speech production; so it’s interesting to wonder whether what is happening is the wires are getting crossed, as it were, and receptive circuits start connecting to productive circuits that control the speech organs to produce different sounds. What’s more, TFA doesn’t say if it was a good or accurate or even geographically consistent and coherent accent.

leereeves2• 3 years ago

There are definitely "deficits", i.e. sounds that we never learn to produce or distinguish because they aren't used by any of the languages we speak. In fact, we all have a lot of deficits:

"Linguists estimate that the world’s languages use 800-plus phonemes [basic sounds]. Any given language will use only a subset of these, typically a few dozen."[1]

Examples that might be familiar to an English speaker include the French "u" sound and nasal vowels, which are clear to a French person but difficult for an English speaker to distinguish, or the tones in Chinese language (which I still can't distinguish well despite studying Chinese).

And these deficits definitely contribute to the strange foreign accents we develop when learning new languages.

But an accent is not innately tied to those deficits. Hugh Laurie learned a very good American accent without losing his English accent. I even picked up the ability to speak with a bit of British accent when I lived in Europe, but still normally spoke with my American accent.

1: https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Verbal-Energy/2016/012...

bartislartfast2• 3 years ago

There are so many "English" and "Irish" accents it's hard to really say. I would say Liverpool accent sounds a lot like a hard inner city Dublin accent already. And it makes sense, with these cities having so much history, trade, and traffic.

Likewise, Scottish / Northern Irish accents are more similar to each other than accents in the Southern end of their own respective landmasses.

But in this case, it's someone far, far away from Ireland* developing an "Irish" accent. I would be very interested to know if that accent sounded geniune to someone Irish or if the accent was an SNL style Irish impression, ie what the patient _believed_ was the accent.

* although it is worth noting, despite the distance, the Newfoundland accent is absolutely indistinguishable from a genuine Irish accent. Any time I hear Newfoundlanders speak I'm stunned at how they sound like they live a few miles away from me.

[example - this guy could be my nextdoor neighbour](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YlyT9bg4o8)

leereeves2• 3 years ago

although it is worth noting, despite the distance, the Newfoundland accent is absolutely indistinguishable from a genuine Irish accent

That makes sense, because Newfoundland was settled by the Irish[1]. I guess the Irish accent in Ireland hasn't changed much since then, and the settlers accent didn't change either.

It's said that "Americans preserved British English" from the 1700s[2], and it's actually the British accent that changed.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Newfoundlanders

2: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

bkfunk2• 3 years ago

Note that TFA says that the man in question lived in England at some point in his 20s, so not that “far away”, in terms of amount of exposure to various Irish accents. Also, it doesn’t say whether it was an accurate or consistent accent. He could have just been doing the accent of the Lucky Charms guy.

plpbs• 3 years ago

I knew the whole IRA cease-of-arms thing was bullshit...

raincom• 3 years ago

Speech is controlled by muscles, which in turn is effected by signals from brain (through nervous system). So, in his case, cancer could be affecting the nervous system.

Iris2645• 3 years ago

Tl;Dr not to waste your time

He had brain metastases

US cancer patient developed 'uncontrollable' Irish accent

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