alt Hacker NewsA note to writers, when a stroke or other brain injury victim relearns speech the worst comparison you can make is "speaking french" or "like Steffi Graf" because it's not an acquired foreign accent syndrome, it's a brain injury.
It's a speech impairment. They're relearning how to form words. Just because one culture forms a rhotic R one way and another culture forms it another way or even deprecates it doesn't make you speak in their accent.
Myabe a bit pedantic but I've always disliked this "my husband spoke French after his stroke" thing.
I admit .. "like Steffi Graff" signals how it sounds, at least to somebody. My friends with stroke speech impairment spoke like they'd had dental local anaesthetic, or were talking through a mouthful of marbles. It's as if they had lost control of some of the finer grained muscles related to speech and had the gross motor skills for the breath, the vocal cords, and the jaw only.
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A more favorable look is that the impeded person sounds like someone who has to learn the language as a non-native. If you've read the bit about her learning to walk consciously, it's not an odd comparison. Everything has to be done from the "wrong" starting point.
She calls it "her German," BTW.
PS I should add there are quite a few different types of aphasia. The case in the article seems uncommon.
Well I'd need to see an actual example of the French thing. But I think a comparison to a thick accent would often work. When I speak Spanish my accent involves enough consistent clumsy wrongness that you could probably compare it to a speech impediment in a native Spanish speaker.
I totally agree with what you're saying, but just to note that in this article, the person who had the stroke is describing the experience. Whether someone told her that or whether she heard it herself, she found it meaningful enough to describe it that way herself.