Quid Pro Quo

That's pretty cool.

Yeah I thought so

Yeah! I agree w/ Roger. However, I hope not many school kids read this as it could give them an excuse to be lax in their spelling!

That never crossed my mind - You still need to have the correct letters which comprise the word other wise its difficult to read.

slvoaiatn ta lsat!

--epouiurm

Deos tihs maen the end of the egnislh lnagauge as we kwon it? Wlil our ytouh be rdaenig "Fuor socre and sveen yares ago our fhatres bghurot frtoh on tihs cintoennt a new nitaon..."?

Who knows, but I could easily read what you wrote - The catch is it really only works because 'we' know the correct spelling of the word and our minds are just correcting the order of the letters. Bottom-line: I think it pretty neat how quick our minds process information and then correct it.

Hey, you misspelled "kwon". By the rules of the original post, it should be "konw"... hee, hee!

How ironic! Msipeelng mispelled words.

I too messed up with 'ta' ('at') in my post (#3).

-E

Is this true for any language other than English?

I would think yes - since we are all human, out brains work in the same way. See stilljester's post #7.

Hloa! Cmoo esats mi aigmo? Epsreo que etses bein.

Yeah? Well that's easy for you to say!

--E

Hey, it works! And I don't even read Albanian !

http://www.bigbadugly.com/StanleyUnwinIndex.htm

gents:

very interesting, the only problem I had was with letters that, when paired, create a third sound "s" & "h" paired an "t" & "h" etc

It is remarkable, though, how quickly you can read through the original post, isn't it? I suppose it relates not just to the fact that we read wlohe wrods at a time, but that we also get a lot of meaning from context, and are already expecting a creatin type of word before we read it. (And then there are the words that are "correctly" or almost correctly spelled... but the wrong word.)

English is probably the only language that can be abused to this extent while the meaning still comes through. Perhaps this explains why it has become a lingua franca.

Reputedly, English is "easy to learn and most difficult to master".

Reputedly, English is "easy to learn and most difficult to master".

I know I'm still trying.

Using the same theory, they say 'experts' or 'genius' minds can look at an entire situation and come up with the 'right' reaction or response. Sort of a compound version of the same concept. I wonder if it works for very large words of more than 7 characters, since it has been shown we average folk can only process things in groups of 6 or 7. Imagine being able to summarize an entire corporations complex set of business rules, people process, computers into 3 or 4 easy to remember steps or a football quarterback scan of the field, instantly they know. But it only happens because we FIRST know how to read words spelled the right way first. So an expert, has 'seen' many situations before, is able to process the view like mis spelled words, into chunks they know and wala - the response is right all the time. Look at expert chess players manage 10 games at the same time. They just know what the right move is in all these situations, they are not thinking 10 moves ahead on 10 tables, that is what makes them genius. Our brains think in chunks. This is the key to learning. Building blocks of knowledge require the building of the first blocks to be correctly built, and each chunk incrementally added, will eventually make it possible to see the forest from the trees and we all become gurus.

Furthermore, when we are born, our brains are fully meshed. That is everything is related. By the time we are 3 or 4, most of the links are disconnected and only the links used remain. When we are older, they can be rebuilt, but harder. Cant teach an old dog new tricks. So in theory, the younger we learn, and I mean, young, like 0 -3 years old, the higher our pyramid of learning can grow.

this is my 2.5 cents.

Its fine for those who speak English as a first language. That allows the filling in of the gaps. My wife says she cannot read my writing but she reads with Spanish as her base language and I write with English. So the remark about context is very appropriate.

But also native language seems a key part. Do we have any replies from someone in India, China, or where English is not the first spoken language ?

If I can find the time, I'd like to experiment with this a bit in light of comprehensibility vs length. I suspect you're probably right about this. I'd say just offhand that as the length increases, so do the chances the same set of letters spell different words which all begin and end with the original letters. The longer the word, the greater the ambiguity of its original spelling. Other factors, like you mentioned, where we can only process letter groups smaller than some threshold, very likely come into play as well. I'd also be interested to know if certain arrangements of the same letters are less comprehensible than other arrangements (barring the original spelling!). For example, putting all the vowels in the middle, but in reverse order of appearance, with the consonants shared between the ends in some semi-scrambled reverse order. Sounds like a job for Perl.