US cancer patient developed 'uncontrollable' Irish accent | Hacker News Reader

US cancer patient developed 'uncontrollable' Irish accent

bbc.com

25 pointsdoener25 comments

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?

Absolutely not. Talk with second generation immigrants.

what is absolutely not?

That: "Makes me wonder if accents are not just random assortments of pronunciation rules, but if there is a biological basis."

It’s clearly wrong as second generation immigrants don’t share their parents accent.

People downvoting you has no idea. I've heard 2nd gen Latinoamerican kids grown in Spain with no overseas traits at all. Not even slang, they spoke native Iberian Spanish from their region.

Interesting you mention that, I have noticed that in Spain as well, as well as in Israel(2nd generation immigrants from argentina), and never an accent. But in the USA 2nd and even sometimes 3rd generation kids from whose parents are from Mexico, will have a distinct accent, and I always found it very curious.

That’s because plenty of kids from 2nd generation immigrants from Mexico actually grow up mostly speaking and hearing Mexican Spanish and very little English because that’s doable in the US.

Your accent is entirely depend on your ability to distinguish and form sounds something which kids naturally pick from their environment but become harder as you lose plasticity.

Having a biological basis doesn't necessarily mean it's genetic or heritable.

Care to explain to me how a trait shared by a population and having a biological basis could be non heritable?

Environmental factors. At some level, everything in the brain is biological.

People doing manual labor tend to have rougher hands than people who work at a desk.

If you work out a lot you will have larger muscles and be stronger. And if you worked out a lot in the past, you'll likely be able to put on muscle stronger.

A lot of things that we experience change our bodies and brains. The question is, do they do it in a consistent way that we can pinpoint? Like finding a little structure that is more developed in people who learned Mandarin as their first language vs English, and that lets you distinguish tones better.

I’m bit confused because that’s not how I understood the idea of having a biological basis. If the point was "The way you emit and understand sound has a basis in your brain structure and its development", the answer is obviously yes like everything humans do as has been known for decades and is trite.

I thought we were considering the idea that structures helping develop an accent rather than other might be inherited as sort of extension to Chomsky theory of language. Which would be an idea somewhat worth considering but easily disprovable.

“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.

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...

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)

> 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...

> It's said that "Americans preserved British English" from the 1800s[2], and it's actually the British accent that changed.

I might well believe that, but then the question is, which American accent is the British one? Alaskan? Texan? Mid-west?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangier,_Virginia is the usual factoid

> That makes sense, because Newfoundland was settled by the Irish

I did a walking tour when I visited St John's, Newfoundland. The history recounted during the tour was that the merchant ships would leave the Southern English coast (Southampton, Portsmouth etc) and stop off by the Southern Irish coast to fill the ships with cheap labour. At the end of the season, the merchants filled the boats with produce from the season (furs etc) and many of the Irish workers would be left behind rather than use up precious cargo space. I've no idea how close to the truth that "history" was.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Tl;Dr not to waste your time

He had brain metastases

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