What it takes to make cpoy readable

English university study

[Robert Charlton]

This is making the rounds of the internet and is on so many sites I can't tell whether I'm violating copyright or not by posting it...

Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod dosen't mttaer, the olny thnig thta's iopmrantt is that the frsit and lsat ltteer of eevry word is in the crcreot ptoision. The rset can be jmbueld and one is stlil able to raed the txet wiohtut dclftfuiiy.

Incidentally, when I searched for elgnsih unviesitry on Google to see if I could locate the source, Google returned this spelling message:

Did you mean to search for: elgnsih university

;)

[Mohamed_E]

Kidding aside, the quoted text is perfectly readable and intelligible. It seems that they do have a point.

[moltar]

Great find! Very interesting points indeed.

[digitalghost]

Wlhie taht sppinet of txet is rdbeale it was aolmst ctrnialey csheon wthi smoe dbiilreeaotn, aglzniamy it deos cniidcoe wtih a cbldreansoie anuomt of rcrseeah on toyps and tierh aitibly to be rngzieoced wtih riiatpdy.

[Robert Charlton]

I found it fascinating. There are probably degrees of readability to be considered... whether there are other key letters inside words and how much they're shifted, eg... but clearly first and last letters are important.

In searching Google, I could find a million examples of this paragraph, but unfortunately no sources for the study. If anyone happens upon it, I'd lkie to see mroe on the sujbcet.

[Robert Charlton]

cbldreansoie?

dg and I were posting at the same time... He does have a pinot (noir?)

[digitalghost]

I'll dig out the Oxford and Berkeley papers I have on this. It does indeed have a lot to do with sentence structure, vowel order, consonant order and overall word familiarity. The studies I have were focused on pronunciation apathy and the resulting slang spellings that arise from the malformed pronunciation and lazy enunciation.

Jeet jet?
No. Joo?
Notchet.
Bouddanhour erso.
Whatcha avin?
Dunno. Prolly same ol same ol.
I earya.

[Duckula]

Fascinating. Reminds me somewhat of the readability of hebrew language.

For example, a quote in hebrew may be phonetically "avir harim zalul kayayin" but written in characters it is "avvir hrim tzlvl kyyn" and many of the letters are missing (mostly vowels, but sometimes consonants too) and the content is (supposely) still readable.

[Marcia]

Sijo dere dego, a tousand buses inero
Nojo demstreux, summit couzen summit duex

[digitalghost]

You bring up a good point with Hebrew. Ever wonder why there's a First and Second Timothy? Or a First and Second Samuel? It's all about those pesky vowels that were added. Doubled the length of the books so they were divided into two parts.

I gotta bail on this thread, if we start talking about words and origins and pronunciations I'll be here all day and I'll get nothing done. ;)

[Duckula]

I'll give a chance for Samuel, but Timothy was not in hebrew originally (it was in greek, as most of NT; I think).

[digitalghost]

Depends on which codex set you believe came first. ;) Personally, I've always felt that the books were created in two parts but several scholars disagree with me. ;) There are some that suggest that NT books were created in two parts to replicate OT structure. Many others suggest that the original NT was written in Hebrew/Aramaic.

<back OT, not Old Testament /> I grabbed some prose from various authors, Shakespeare, Plato, Milton, Stephen King, etc and ran some simple tests and the word recognition for misplaced characters decreases considerably with regard to number of syllables, double consonants, double vowels, letter placement and so on. Placing letters from the second or third syllable into the first syllable seems to confuse people more readily than mixing up the letters within their respective syllables. For words that aren't commonly used the recognition falls drastically regardless of how the word is jumbled.

I'm off to play.