Yorkshire man wakes up Irish after brain surgery A Yorkshire man woke up from brain surgery to find he'd turned from a flat vowelled, thrifty dalesman into a blarney kissing, 'Danny Boy' singing, happy-go-lucky Dubliner. The Daily Mail reports that 30 year old Chris Gregory spent three days on life support, after a blood vessel in his brain ruptured. While the staff were …
The Irish accent is obviously something everyone is born with and we then learn to speak another language or with another accent as we grow older. Must be something deep within our DNA. Possibly something for the Human Genome Project to look at? Perhaps there's a special gene sequence responsible for language after all.
Though I guess that some kind of double blind test would need to be done in order to make it scientifically relevant. Volunteers anyone?
Reminds me of a joke about an Irishman who had brain surgery; when he woke up the doctor told him the surgeon had had to remove half his brain. He said, 'Godverdomme, mijn hoofdpijnen.' Translation - a Dutchman is an Irishman with half a brain.
..On the other hand it just goes to show there's a little bit of the happy Irish soul in all of us.
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His wife-to-be walked into the ward, and heard a commotion including "someone singing 'Danny Boy' really loud. It sounded like a drunken Irishman, and all the racket seemed to coming from the direction of Chris’s bed."
Mrs Gregory then realised the Ronan Keating-a-like was her future husband who had apparently been reset from tyke to jackeen. On spotting his wife, he apparently declared "It's da broid."
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Now does this mean that the guy already had a soon-to-be-divorced wife who happened to be in the room at the same and, by sheer coincidence, his new wife-to-be is either currently, or was married to another Mr. Gregory...
@AC 11:04 GMT Tut Tut, everyone knows we only keep things simple so you sassenachs (yeah it means the same in Irish) can understand.
Obviously he received a blow in the back of the head where the automatic language functions are, he then thought he was Tom Cruise trying to copy an Orish accent, "It's da broid.", more Brooklyn then Dublin. If he thought he was a Dub he would have said "It's me mot"
However I could understand it if he had a large piece of his brain removed and then thought he was a member of Boyzone or Westlife.
Cool one El Reg, jackeen, somebody in the know? A bogger on the staff, Is Ms Bee really Ms O'Bee.
Absofuckinglutely, the only song you'll never hear in Ireland.
Obviously the Yorkshireman thought he'd died and gone to a better place where he could have his hearts desire, to be promoted to Irish and within those hallowed ranks to be a Dubliner the most exalted of all Irishmen. Sadly it was not to be and after a half hour of bliss he returned from being a citizen to a subject. Either that or bagpuss went back to sleep.
i can go along with someone's accent changing after a blow to the head, but speaking in another language they have never learnt before?
that's either lies/exaggeration, or something that deserves lots & lots of investigation, imagine what it could do for educating the world.. it's not quite at the matrix "i know kung-fu" but still, imagine the applications, someone must be investigating this seriously, shirley?
Sorry not into the hoofing game but I remember seeing this daft english football manager who had landed a job in Holland being interviewed by dutch TV - in english - and putting on a comedy-piss take dutch akshent for the benefit of the viewers! Goes to show the requirements for the job being a preemptive lobotomy. To be sure.
What we have is a bunch of people hearing something that sounds Irish to them.
Think of it as a sort of slurred speech where a phoneme has warped to affect the overall sound.
What I'd like to know is whether somebody who has studied accents hears Irish, or damaged Yorkshire.
Are you sure? Have you never passed by one of O'Carrolls "crud to sell to tourists" shops? (apart from Irish Rugby Jerseys) Have you ever heard the rubbish that passes for music in these shops? I have to stop typing now, I beginning to feel unwell just thinking about it (apart from the Irish Rugby Jerseys).
It's impossible to damage Yorkshire more than it is already.
as for the 'Irish' accent, and the singing of 'Danny Boy'... if someone started singing 'Danny Boy' around here they wouldn't like the reaction they'd get.
And it's not terrifying to wake up and think you're French, it's terrifying to be driving on the same road as someone who thinks they're French. Or worse, Quebecois. ("Quebecois: someone who drives like a Frenchman, only at the wheel of a large American car.")
Once you get past the usual press funny-story nonsense, the actual facts of these kind of stories usually comes down the the person's speech being affected in such a way that it sounds kind of like what some people think as similar to a bad impression of a particular accent.
No sudden transfer to a different life in a different country, no sudden mastery of a foreign language, no sudden adopting of clichéd national expressions and songs.
However, once a newspaper gets hold of it, all the other bollocks gets fabricated and the poor brain-damaged victim is made to sound like a caricature and given no end of mysterious and magical abilities to go with their new found 'accent'.
in 1980 i fell from a low wall which i slipped off (whilst running away from some of the skool bullies) and landed on my head. Ii suffered a blackout, severe concussion, brain damage, (oh and it hurt like hell!).
Thanks to this little stunt i spent a week in hospital after a number of head xrays with suspected fractured skull. (I also ended up OD'ing on paracetamol and aspirin because of the severe headaches for the following year or so, and now have a liver that looks like edam cheese.)
I then spent the following 6 months or more walking around with an American accent.
This was really-really not funny, and my life at skool was made hell by all the (then 80's chavs).
For the following couple of years i would on occasion drop into an american accent when under stress, eventually my accent changed to full on BBC news presenter English.
(yeah too much TV really is bad for you, especially all those late night politics programs).
Which got me into even more trouble with the oiks who all spoke with a broad devon accent.
we also had all those alien spaceships being observed over devon in those years..... what a pity i wasnt abducted as well...
i could be flying about in a spaceship or be used as an experiment, instead of on the long term dole, wasting my life away typing this rubbish about my failed les-miserable life on a late tuesday afternoon...
btw... Need more frequent BOFH episodes :)
@Rapacity
By Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 28th April 2009 13:21 GMT
Happy
"Godverdomme, mijn hoofdpijnen" Literal translation - "god damn it, my head hurts"; could have been flemish Belgian but then they'd need to remove far more than half the brain - more like 95%.
AC so my Belgian wife doesn't find out.
BTW just as well it wasn't a Lancastrian accent...
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My dear chap perhaps you should check yourself for missing most of your brain... Had it not been for them stupid flemish you english would have been quite a bit poorer off at the start of the industrial revolution and during the wars with the French...
Not to mention that apparently cricket would find its origins in a lawn game player in Flanders looooooong time ago...
Also all our beers but our lagers are much better than anything (bar ciders) in GB... I totally understand why you go the coward way... she should kick you out and squeeze you dry...
I would dare to presume you are a typical limey arse who still thinks there is such a thing as the British Empire
The Flemish are (drumroll please) swamp-Germans. Ay thank yew, thank yew. I believe that little remark will get you stabbed in most parts of the Nederlands.
@Gav You must be a wikipeado applying half-baked reason to facts resulting in a "reasonable compromise" which is in fact a lie. It's the sort of faux-reasoning which conspiracy nuts thrive on and it's the reason many wikipedia articles are complete garbage. Blessed be the cheesemakers.
Fluent Dysphasia (2004)film short
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNI9eBGYpvw
A father in Ireland goes to watch a football match with his buddy while his daughter has to study Irish, or Gaelic - the ancient language of Ireland. After over-celebrating his club's victory, he awakes in the morning and finds he only speaks Irish, and that he doesn't even understand English. His buddy is aghast at this situation, believing his friend to have become possessed, but his daughter manages to translate his friend's assertion that this change may have been caused by a blow to the head during the revelries of the past evening's celebrations. They decide to hit him again, and use a frying pan for the job. Disastrous results ensue. ..
Isn't this just another of those egregiously specious theories cooked up by doctors who mistake correlation for cause?
The blow on the 'ead caused the Irish/Flemish witterings? Pshaw! Might it not equally be that blows to the head are *caused by* rambling in alien accents? 'Appen this poor tyke was rabbitin such execrable English that his blood vessel just burst. Similarly, a very poor Durham imitation can result in severe blows to the cranium with a frying-pan. And it's best to avoid atrocious Brummie altogether, for obvious reasons.
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