Like many other catters, I'm interested in language.

Parade Magazine week an interview with English actress Emily Blunt last week. Emily has been in 'more than a dozen' movies. Emily said that as a child, she had a severe stammer, the source of much unhappiness. But then, at 12, she was in a school play. To quote Emily,

"I had a wonderful teacher who encouraged me to try a different accent from what I normally talk in. I don't know why it freed my voice, but it did."

I consider that amazing. That a slight modification of her mother tongue (which is what an accent is) could free her from a severe speech problem. Evidently, her stammer wasn't related to a problem with expressing concepts, it had to do with pronouncing sounds.

Since reading that, I've looked up 'stammer' and 'stutter.' There is some overlap in the words, but stammering seems to mean having long pauses and interruptions in speech, while stuttering mostly involves repetition of sounds.

I wonder what Noam Chomsky [sp?] would make of all this.