Well, it interested me, anyway....

[venta]

Just received this in a bit of junk email:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer
in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is
taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a
toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we
do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Ceehiro

Anyone got any thoughts?

(No, I don't really imagine it's the result of serious research anywhere)

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

You mean the writing made perfect sense ? Yes, to me too. i read it through with no problems at all. That's what surprised me.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Ths shld prbbly ls mk prfct sns - tkng th vwls ot f nglsh wrds ds nt ffct th mnng mch. Thr s lts f rdndncy whch mns tht y cn dlt lttrs nd stll b bl t rd t.

(On the other hand, deleting the consonants makes it unreadable - o e oe a, eei e ooa ae i ueaae.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ths shld prbbly ls mk prfct sns

It did, thought it was considerably more effort to read than the muddled paragraph above. I had to think a few times, whereas I just read the other like plain text.

o e oe a, eei e ooa ae i ueaae

Aaaaargh, it's a banshee....

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Yup. If you have all the letters but in the wrong order, you have more information than if you're actually missing some of the letters. The first and last letter stuff is interesting, but I think it'll also work if you have some kind of consistent re-ordering - ekil fi uoy etirw gnihtyreve sdrawkcab, rof ecnatsni.

onder f hat'll appen f ust eave ut he irst etter f very ord? ow oes hat ffect omprehension?

I'm going to stop attempting to type in non-standard-English about now, it's making my head hurt ;)

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the one word I had to pause on there was "ls", which adds extra weight to the idea that the first and last letters are the most important to have.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Also possibly because it's one of the words where there were at least two possibilities ('else' and 'also' spring to mind).

[nevecat.livejournal.com]

onder f hat'll appen f ust eave ut he irst etter f very ord? ow oes hat ffect omprehension?

It's understandable, but sounds like someone is speaking with badly fitted false teeth. Possibly whilst accidentally spitting small gobbets of well-chewed granary bread onto the clothing of the hapless listener.

Uh, for suitable values of 'sounds' anyway...and don't ask me why *granary* bread. It just *does*!

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

ow oes hat ffect omprehension?

The interesting thing (I found) about the rearrangement of letters was that I could skim-read it perfectly well without actually analysing what was going on. This wasn't the case for the missing vowels or the backward words - in both cases there were words in the sentence that I could only recover by consciously applying the rule to the letters I could see.

It's a bit debateable in the case of the missing first letter, since "I" was the only word it applied to.