For those of us who were wondering what the heck it is that Andrea was doing to that guy in that photo [Seattle Times], I asked her and this is my version of what she told me.

Apparently, when Indians speak English, they often times don't produce the puffs of air that American or other English speakers will make for letters such as 'p'. To help them make the sound properly, one technique is to put a piece of paper in front of the speaker to give them a visual indication of how much of a puff they made when saying certain words.

I looked this up on Google and found that this is called "aspiration":

Aspiration Is the sound pronounced with an accompanying puff of air? Place your hand in front of your mouth. (Pretend you're hiding a yawn.) Say "pit". Say "bit". See the difference? If you're a native speaker of English you sure will, because in English, the voiceless stops (of which /p/ is one) are always aspirated when they're the initial consonant. Say "pit" again, then say "spit". See the difference? You're more likely to spit on your listeners when saying pit than spit, because the s before p in spit makes the p unaspirated. Why don't we aspirate the /b/ in bit? Mainly because it's a voiced consonant, meaning the vocal cords vibrate, and to do so they must close - which means they can't let through that puff of air that follows the /p/! It's not impossible to aspirate a voiced consonant, though. Sanskrit (and proto-Indo-European) had aspirated voiced stops: bh, dh, etc., as in "Mahabharata" (great book, by the way...) [Fictional Linguistics].

I guess she wasn't punching the guy afterall... 3:36:44 PM    comment []  

This is kinda cool. Some people came to our offices a couple of weeks ago and filmed some footage that is being featured on the Windows Media website [footage][website]. 3:23:08 PM    comment []