Weekly News Splatter: April 24, 2010

So, I've decided to implement a new feature here at Schendo's Bad Grammar, a weekly cattle drive of anthropological and linguistic red meat that I have fearlessly rounded up and delivered for your reading pleasure.

It's been a great week to be Eyjafjallajökull. I don't think an exploding mountain has gotten this much attention since '97, when Tommy Lee Jones successfully battled the crust of the earth in that classic of American cinema, Volcano. For those who are eager to impress your dinner party companions this weekend, an avalanche of websites and videos are offering the correct pronunciation, such as this video from abcnews.com and this language log post with several helpful native Icelandic examples. For those of us with an IPA chart hanging somewhere on their wall at home (you know who you are...) it has also been a good week for Icelandic phonology, with both language log and John Wells weighing in with informative posts.

For quick and dirty pronunciation advice, you can't beat the BBC (which apparently has their own unit devoted to such things):

Eyjafjallajökull (or Eyafallajökull) is pronounced AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl (-uh) , that is -ay as in day, -fy as in few, -oe as in French coeur, -uu as in boot, the -tl as in atlas. The (-uh) is "a" as in ago.

Personally, I'm just going to keep saying “THAT volcano.”

I think that I can safely say that most of us were surprised this week to learn about a 35 year old British woman who developed a Chinese accent after an intense migraine attack. As it turns out, Foreign Accent Syndrome is actually a misnomer, as the “foreignness” of the patient's speech has more to do with listeners' perceptions. Most of the documented sufferers have had little or no contact with the languages whose accents they supposedly acquired, including the woman mentioned in the article. For those interested, a special issue of the Journal of Neurolinguistics was published about Foreign Accent Syndrome just a few years ago.

Well, that's a start.  Anything I missed?  What were your favorite stories from this week in humanity?