Two items

[Brian Akers]

Here are two items from the Agora Newsletter:

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Foreign Accents The Easy Way!...  But Which One?

A Scottish woman went to bed with a headache and woke up
speaking with a South African accent according to a British
doctor (Reuters 10/9/97).  Instead of her Scottish brogue,
the woman had a different voice with an intonation more
similar to that in Cape Town, South Africa.  Doctors claim
she is suffering from Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), a
condition  for which there are less than 20 reported cases
in the past.

In Takayama et. al.Os discussion of FAS ("A case of foreign
accent syndrome without aphasia caused by a lesion of the
left precentral gyrus",  _Neurology_ 1993;43:1361-1363) the
case of a right-handed, 44-year-old woman, a native
Japanese, is presented.  ODisposition and inversion of
pitch accents and appearance of unnecessary stress accents
made her speech sound foreign, like that of Korean.  MRI
demonstrated an infarction in the middle fifth of the
posterior lateral aspect of the left precentral gyrus.
Limited motor cortex damage causes FAS without dysarthria,
apraxia of speech, or aphasia.O

Other cases are cited such as the Massachusetts woman who
walked away from a car accident speaking with a French
accent, an English speaker sounding Nordic, and another
American sounding Eastern European, Slavic, French, Dutch,
or Scandinavian.

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English Name Offensive to Turkish Student

Here is some food for thought as we move toward the
Thanksgiving season.  M. Gokhan Dalgic writes in a Boston
Globe editorial section on 9/27/97:

   "I, and 70 million others, are proud of our country
"Turkiye."  Perhaps you are not familiar with the word,
because this is the name of my country in Turkish, not in
English.
   I am a student studying English in Boston. Every time I
had a look at a restaurant or cafe menu, I feel insulted
because the English meaning of my country's name is listed
as the name of a sandwich or a meal.
   I don't want you to change the names of your sandwiches
or meals, but I want you and all people speaking English,
please to say and write "Turkiye" (pronounced TUR as in
turn, KI as in key, YE as in yell) when you are talking
about my country.
   This is not only my wish but it is the wish of all Turks
that people refer to their country this way."

...and you thought the people on Uranus had it bad.

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