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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] captainmuon|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bartislartfast|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] leereeves|3 years ago|reply
"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...
[+] [-] gxt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxbaines|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mad_as_a_hatter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raincom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plpbs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iris2645|3 years ago|reply
He had brain metastases