A British woman has suddenly started speaking with a Chinese accent after suffering a severe migraine, she said in comments quoted by British media on Tuesday.

Sarah Colwill believes she has Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) which has caused her distinctive West Country drawl to be replaced with a Chinese twang, even though she has never even visited the country.

The 35-year-old from Plymouth, southwest England, is now undergoing speech therapy following an acute form of migraine last month which reportedly left her with a form of brain damage.

"I moved to Plymouth when I was 18 months old so I have always spoken like a local. But following one attack, an ambulance crew arrived and they said I definitely sounded Chinese," she said.

"I spoke to my stepdaughter on the phone from hospital and she didn't recognise who I was. She said I sounded Chinese. Since then, I have had my friends hanging up on me because they think I'm a hoax caller."

Ms Colwill added: "The first few weeks of the accent was quite funny but to think I am stuck with this Chinese accent is getting me down. My voice has started to annoy me now. It is not my voice."

FAS has been documented around the world and is usually linked to a stroke or traumatic brain injury. It was first recorded in the early 20th century and there are thought to be only a couple of dozen sufferers around the world.

.. from The Strangerest.

Croatian teenager wakes from coma speaking fluent German

A 13-year-old Croatian girl who fell into a coma woke up speaking fluent German.

This is not a picture of the girl.

The girl, from the southern town of Knin, had only just started studying German at school and had been reading German books and watching German TV to become better, but was by no means fluent, according to her parents.

Since waking up from her 24 hour coma however, she has been unable to speak Croatian, but is able to communicate perfectly in German.

Doctors at Split's KB Hospital claim that the case is so unusual, various experts have examined the girl as they try to find out what triggered the change.

Hospital director Dujomir Marasovic said: "You never know when recovering from such a trauma how the brain will react. Obviously we have some theories although at the moment we are limited in what we can say because we have to respect the privacy of the patient."

Psychiatric expert Dr Mijo Milas added: "In earlier times this would have been referred to as a miracle, we prefer to think that there must be a logical explanation – its just that we haven't found it yet.

"There are references to cases where people who have been seriously ill and perhaps in a coma have woken up being able to speak other languages – sometimes even the Biblical languages such as that spoken in old Babylon or Egypt – at the moment though any speculation would remain just that – speculation – so it's better to continue tests until we actually know something."

.. from The Strangerest

Jalan Kejora back to Jalan Alor!

KUALA LUMPUR: Much to the joy of the public, a new signboard bearing the name "Jalan Alor" replaced the Jalan Kejora signboard on Thursday in Bukit Bintang by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL).

The new signboard was put up after Kuala Lumpur mayor Datuk Ab Hakim Borhan announced on Oct 29 that the previous road name would be retained after Federal Territories Minister Datuk Seri Zulhasnan Rafique intervened.

In a statement yesterday Zul­hasnan urged DBKL to refer matters concerning change of road names to the ministry in future to avoid similar controversies.

“Jalan Alor is not only popular in Malaysia but also all over the world.

“I understand the people’s sentiment over the initial decision for the change to Kejora and I hope the hawkers on Jalan Alor will press on cleanliness,” he said.

Two weeks ago DBKL replaced the old Jalan Alor signboard with Jalan Kejora which created a huge public outcry that caught the attention of the Federal Territories Ministry.

Bukit Bintang MP Fung Kui Lun said Jalan Alor was a brand name for over 50 years to both locals and foreigners and the decision to change it would have caused confusion.

“This is what the people want and I think it is fair to retain the name, everyone is happy,” he said.

Locals and tourists want Jalan Alor to be maintained

KUALA LUMPUR: Jalan Alor on Yahoo! returns more than 900,000 results. It is famous.

Yet, Kuala Lumpur City Hall is adamant that changing the name to Jalan Kejora - a move that has sparked a public outcry - is the right thing to do.

Datuk Bandar Datuk Ab Hakim Borhan said the move, which was planned three years ago, would give the tourist destination of Bukit Bintang a new image.

Popular spot: Azmi (left) serving customers at his 'Nasi Lemak Alor Corner' stall along Jalan Alor recently.

"Other roads in the area will soon have new names, and they will all be named after the stars to create the new image," he said yesterday during a visit to a landslide site in Cheras.

The name change came to light when city hall replaced the road sign about a week ago. The Jalan Alor name has been in existence for 35 years.

City Hall explained that the name was changed at the request of the National Economic Action Council to meet requirements under the road naming guidelines and to go with other roads in the vicinity.

The MP for Bukit Bintang, Fong Kui Lun, who has brought the matter up with the Federal Territories Minister, said: "How can you change the name just like that?"

Name confusion?: Tourists (from left) O'Connor, Jack Coppock and Caitlin Coppock feel that the popular street should retain its name for the convenience of tourists looking for the place the next time they return here.

He said a search of Jalan Alor on the Yahoo! search engine returned more than 900,000 results.

"You can imagine how famous this food haven is internationally," he said.

Fong said that the area had taken years to establish its reputation and changing its name overnight was unfair to the locals.

"We want the name maintained," he said, adding that he would bring up the matter up to the Tourism Minister.

Traders in the area could not fathom the rationale behind the move.

"Why must they change the name when it is already popularly known among the locals and tourists?" said Loke Yew, who has been selling fruits there for the past 35 years.

Trader Azmi Aznal said: "Even my stall is called Nasi Lemak Alor Corner and now City Hall has changed the road name for no apparent reason.

"Does that also mean I should change my stall's name too?"

Several tourists have frowned at the move.

"The new name will definitely confuse some of us when trying to find the place in the future," Australian tourists Jenny O'Connor and Caitlin Coppock said.

It is learnt that traders and residents have embarked on a signature campaign to stop the change in name.

Datuk Dr Lee Chong Meng, the Bukit Bintang MCA division chief and a former MP there, said the change was not justified, and that City Hall should focus on more meaningful issues.

How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They're the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means "handicapped bathroom.")

But what if these sentences aren't really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don't get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It's not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of "har-muh-nee," it's "har-moh-nee." And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced "tink," and theories is "tee-oh-rees."

English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: "How many informations can your flash drive hold?" In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don't require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: "Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?"

One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you. They're each pronounced with tone — the linguistic feature that gives spoken Mandarin its musical quality — adding a specific pitch to words to alter their meaning. (If you say "xin" with an even tone, it means "heart"; with a descending tone it means "honest.") According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-English hybrids.

Given the number of people involved, Chinglish is destined to take on a life of its own. Advertisers will play with it, as they already do in Taiwan. It will be celebrated as a form of cultural identity, as the Hong Kong Museum of Art did in a Chinglish exhibition last year. It will be used widely online and in movies, music, games, and books, as it is in Singapore. Someday, it may even be taught in schools. Ultimately, it's not that speakers will slide along a continuum, with "proper" language at one end and local English dialects on the other, as in countries where creoles are spoken. Nor will Chinglish replace native languages, as creoles sometimes do. It's that Chinglish will be just as proper as any other English on the planet.

And it's possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve," maybe conservation isn't so necessary.

Any language is constantly evolving, so it's not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what's happening to English may be its own thing: It's mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it's on a path toward a global tongue — what's coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they'll have to learn may be their own.

.. from wired

speakun Orstraylian

'Oh. Ohh. Neoh!" Mrs Halliday says when introduced to the painter Hurtle Duffield in The Vivisector. "Neoh" is her stab at a Queen's English pronunciation of "no" and Patrick White mocks it heartily. The culture White knew was still joined umbilically to British culture. These days Australian snobs have their own rules of engagement.

Changes in Australian pronunciation, while underscoring pretention and bullshit, also mark our increasing cultural autonomy. Where once the ocker accent may have been genuinely stigmatised, the broad accent of the "howzat, nah, c'mon mite" variety has become a bit of a "celebrity accent", like some strands of black and Cajun English in the US.

The broad accent is something to wheel out for TV spots (The Footy Show), tourists (ever been on the Sydney Explorer bus?) and festive occasions (family barbecues). For many, it's not a mother tongue so much as a party trick we perform as needed - to be funny, to belong, to make a point and, most of all, to avoid being identified as someone who feels superior, even if in truth we do.

Once, people went to university to get rid of their twang. But now it's suburban migrant accents that voice the scary underclass and fade with education. I've heard a few lectures delivered in a bit of an Aussie drawl but I can't imagine one sounding like Habib from Fat Pizza.

This is a revolution in prejudice. There is now the uniquely Australian cachet of not sounding too big for your boots. The agreement seems to be that speaking Strine is a vaccination against wankery.

Unimpressed by overt social class, it is men who have most enjoyed such half-secret vocal handshakes. The ladies have their own game. As one teacher at an exclusive private girls' school told me, eastern suburbs dads may modulate their speech up and down the scale but the mothers are pretty strict.

For evidence of this gender asymmetry, consider Julia Gillard. Born in Wales, a lawyer, very brainy, still she speaks with an exaggerated drawl. This may work in the Labor Party boys' club but the public itches to know why she sounds like a lesbian ex-junkie.

Upwardly mobile Australian women are more likely to hypercorrect. They alter their speech to imitate an accent perceived as more prestigious but overshoot, miss the target sound, and end up making a whole new noise.



In Kath & Kim Prue and Trude, two snobby women working in an expensive homewares shop, do this all the time. They move vowels around in the mouth to show they're old money. Or rather, they do it in order not to sound like Kath and Kim. Broad Aussie "hi" rhymes with "hoy", so they say "haa" instead.

When speaking of Noosa, "Newsa", high up and in front with little mouth articulation, sounds a bit cheap. So we get that bizarre "oor" sound in "Noorsa", which is forced back into the pharynx with exaggerated lip-rounding.

Everything can be sacrificed, even comprehensibility. The freakish way Australian snobs say "Hellooruw" is unique in the world.

Kath and Kim also hypercorrect themselves. Like Prue and Trude, they say their final "t"s funny from time to time. Pauline Hanson did it as well. You know, that kind of breathy sound? It's called hyperaspiration, and it's a classic case of hypercorrection. These women, real and fictional, are on the run from the broad Australian "t", which sounds like a "d", as in "budda" for "butter", or gets dropped at the end of phrases. Some do it more flamboyantly than others. Prue and Trude say "great" as "grayshsh" and "beautiful" as "beyoushshiful". And Kath says: "Yis, I am hoigh maintenance and, frankly, I enjoy ishsh."

Hanson hyperaspirated her "t"s in direct proportion to how nervous and defensive she was. "I don't like it!" had a very windy final consonant. Supposedly a battler against the class system, she still tried to talk noice in her way. When relaxed, she sounded relatively normal.

On the other hand, very few Australian men would ever hyperaspirate and say something was "grayshsh", except maybe a few footsoldiers of the pink mafia - definitely not the generals.

We make up who we are through the way we speak. The accent system in Australia has no equivalent to the extreme regional and class differences in Britain. We play by different rules Down Under, rules shrouded in open secrecy.

.. stolen from smh

The meanings behind some common phrases

STUMP SOMEONE

Meaning: Ask someone a question they can’t answer
Origin: Actually refers to tree stumps. “Pioneers built their houses and barns out of logs … and they frequently swapped work with one another in clearing new ground. Some frontiersmen would brag about their ability to pull up big stumps, but it wasn’t unusual for the boaster to suffer defeat with a stubborn stump.” (From I’ve Got Goose Pimples, by Marvin Vanoni)

PAINT THE TOWN RED

Meaning: Spend a wild night out, usually involving drinking
Origin: “This colorful term … probably originated on the frontier. In the nineteenth century the section of town where brothels and saloons were located was known as the ‘red light district.’ So a group of lusty cowhands out for a night on the town might very well take it into their heads to make the whole town red.” (From Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins Vol. 3, by William and Mary Morris)

STAVE OFF

Meaning: Keep something away, albeit temporarily
Origin: “A stave is a stick of wood, from the plural of staff, staves. In the early seventeenth century staves were used in the ‘sport’ of bull-baiting, where dogs were set against bulls. [If] the dogs got a bull down, the bull’s owner often tried to save him for another fight by driving the dogs off with a stave.” (From Animal Crackers, by Robert Hendrickson)

WING IT

Meaning: Do something with little or no preparation
Origin: “Originally comes from the theater. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it refers to the hurried study of the role in the wings of the theater.” (From The Whole Ball of Wax, by Laurence Urdang)

PUT ON YOUR THINKING CAP

Meaning: Carefully and thoughtfully consider something
Origin: In previous centuries, it was customary for judges to put a cap on before sentencing criminals. Because judges were respected thinkers, it was referred to as a “thinking cap” (From Gordon’s Book of Familiar Phrases)

PLAY FAST AND LOOSE

Meaning: Stretch the truth or meaning of words or rules, deceive or trifle with someone
Origin: This term dates from the 16th century. It comes from a game called “fast and loose,” which was played at fairs. Operators rolled up a strap and left a loop hanging over the edge of a table. To win, a player had to catch the loop with a stick before the strap was unrolled. But they never won. Cheating operators rolled it up in such a way that the feat was impossible. (From Have a Nice Day – No Problem! by Christine Ammer)

BOTCH A JOB

Meaning: Repair badly
Origin: “In old England, bodgers were peasant chairmakers … They produced, by traditional handicraft methods, simple and serviceable objects. When chairmaking was transformed into high art, the bodgers was correspondingly downgraded to ‘bodge’ or ‘botch,’” which came to mean an item or service of poor quality. (From To Coin a Phrase, by Edwin Radford and Alan Smith)

IN HOCK

Meaning: Broke; have all of your belongings in a pawn shop
Origin: Comes from the Old West. In a common gambling card game called “faro,” “the last card [to be played] was called the hocketty card. It was said to be in hocketty or in hock. When a player bet on a card that ended up in hock he was himself in hock, at risk of losing his bets.” (From The Whole Ball of Wax, by Laurence Urdang)

TAKE ANOTHER TACK

Meaning: Try a different strategy
Origin: “Sailing ships could not move directly into the wind but had to tack – zigzag back and forth with the wind first on one side, then on the other. If a skipper approaching harbor found that his vessel couldn’t make the harbor mouth on the starboard tack, he was obviously on the wrong tack, and would have to take the other (port) tack.” (From Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, by Robert Claiborne)

GOT OFF (OR GO) “SCOT-FREE”

Meaning: Escape punishment
Origin: “In the thirteenth century, scot was the word for money you would pay at a tavern for food and drink, or when they passed the hat to pay the entertainer. Later, it came to mean a local tax that paid the sheriff’s expenses. To go scot-free literally meant to be exempted from paying this tax.” (From How Does Olive Oil Lose its Virginity?, by Bruce Tindall and Mark Watson)

SLUSH FUND

Meaning: A hidden cache of money used for illegal or corrupt political purposes
Origin: “Derived from Scandinavian words meaning ‘slops,’ this phrase is derived from the nineteenth-century shipboard practice of boiling up large pots of pork and other fatty meats. The fat that rose to the top of the kettles was stored in vats and then sold to soap and candle makers. The money received from the sale of the ‘slush’ was used for the crew’s comfort and entertainment.” (From Eatioms, by John D. Jacobson)

TAKE SOMEONE DOWN A PEG

Meaning: Humble someone who is self-important and conceited
Origin: “The expression probably originally referred to a ship’s flags. These were raised or lowered by pegs – the higher the position of the flags, the greater the honor. So to take someone down a peg came to mean to lower the esteem in which that person is held.” (From Get to the Roots, by Martin Manser)

BUY A PIG IN A POKE

Meaning: Buying something sight unseen
Origin: “The poke was a small bag (the words pouch and pocket derive from the same roots), and the pig was a small pig. As related in Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundredth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1580), the game was to put a cat in the poke and try to palm it off in the market as a pig, persuading the buyer that it would be best not to open the poke because the pig might get away.” (From The Dictionary of Cliches, by James Rogers)

TOUCH AND GO

Meaning: A risky, precarious situation
Origin: “Dates back to the days of stagecoaches, whose drivers were often intensely competitive, seeking to charge past one another, on narrow roads, at grave danger to life and limb. If the vehicle’s wheels became entangled, both would be wrecked; if they were lucky, the wheels would only touch and the coaches could still go.” (From Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, by Robert Claiborne)

KNOCK OFF WORK

Meaning: Leave work for the day
Origin: “[This phrase] originated in the days of slave galleys. To keep the oarsmen rowing in unison, a drummer beat time rhythmically on a block of wood. When it was time to rest or change shifts, he would give a special knock, signifying that they could knock off.” (From Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins Vol.2, by William and Mary Morris)

DOES THAT RING ANY BELLS?

Meaning: Does that sound familiar?
Origin: “Old-fashioned carnivals and amusement parks featured shooting galleries, in which patrons were invited to test their marksmanship by shooting at a target – often with a bell at the center: if something was right on target, it rang the bell. Similarly, to say that something ‘doesn’t ring a bells’ means that it doesn’t strike any ‘target’ (evoke any response) in your mind.” (From Loose Cannons and Red Herrings, by Robert Claiborne)

BEAT THE RAP

The meaning behind some common phrases

Meaning: Avoid punishment for wrongdoing
Origin: “It is likely that this slang Americanism originated in anther expression, take the rap, in which rap is slang for ‘punishment,’ facetiously, from a ‘rap on the knuckles.’ One who takes the rap for someone else stands in for the other’s punishment. Beat the rap … often carries with it the connotation that the miscreant was actually guilty, though acquitted” (From The Whole Ball of Wax, by Laurence Urdang)

BE ABOVEBOARD

Meaning: Be honest
Origin: Comes from card playing. “Board is an old word for table.” To drop your hands below the table could, of course, be interpreted as trying to cheat – by swapping cards, for example. “But if all play was above board this was impossible” (From To Coin a Phrase, by Edwin Radford and Alan Smith)

.. from neatorama

Worlds fastest speaking woman

Froschmausekrieg = "war between the frogs and the mice"

coolhunter noun. A person who investigates cutting-edge trends, fashions, and ideas and sells them as market research to companies so they can incorporate them into their latest products.

reference: wordSpy

...And todays word is:

somnolence.
som·no·lence
n.
A state of drowsiness; sleepiness.

Scientists in Florida believe they know why complex language evolved. Blame it on baby talk. At least 1.6 million years ago some human ancestor mother started saying "goo-goo" and "ba-ba" to her baby as a way of keeping in touch.

And it all began because humans became bipedal. Modern ape babies cling to the maternal fur. Chimpanzee mothers are silent. There could be a link, says Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University.

She reports in the journal Behavioural and Brain Sciences that "motherese", the universal language of motherhood, is characterised by a high-pitched voice, long drawn-out vowels, repetitive phrases and a singsong cadence. These may hold the key to the emergence of language.

"I knew chimp mommies don't make these noises, so I knew something happened during evolution," she said. "The missing puzzle piece was bipedalism. We stood up; we lost hair. It was then that babies could no longer hang on to their mothers. Mothers had to hang on to their babies. That was a eureka moment."

For 200 years researchers have tried to understand how one mammal evolved from grunting and hunting to growing bonsai trees and reading Homer.

Professor Falk believes it all began 1.6 million years ago, when our upright human ancestors were roaming the savanna. The evolutionary development of bigger brains meant that early humans began giving birth before their babies' heads became too big to pass through the birth canal.

This shorter gestational period meant humans gave birth to babies that were undeveloped physically. Foraging mothers would have had to put their babies down to search for food. They may have made noises to reassure them. These noises would have served as codes, and eventually evolved into words.

"The behaviour of chimp mommies and babies and human mothers and infants are delightfully identical in many ways but we are dramatically different in other ways," Professor Falk said.

"We vocalise continually in a way that helps babies begin to learn language. I wanted to find out why we are the only animals that talk, and this need to pacify our babies as humans evolved may be the reason."

...from the Guardian

.:: eleven ::.

ad·ven·ture (d-vnchr)
n.

1. An undertaking or enterprise of a hazardous nature.
2. An undertaking of a questionable nature, especially one involving intervention in another state's affairs.
2. An unusual or exciting experience: an adventure in dining.
3. Participation in hazardous or exciting experiences: the love of adventure.
4. A financial speculation or business venture.


v. ad·ven·tured, ad·ven·tur·ing, ad·ven·tures
v. tr.

1. To venture upon; undertake or try.
2. To expose to danger or risk; hazard.


v. intr.

1. To take a risk; dare.
2. To proceed despite risks.


[Middle English aventure, from Old French, from Latin adventrus, future participle of advenre, to arrive. See advent.]