[Buckaroo]

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too


Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcusea e the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

[phantomdragonz]

OMG this crap again...

did you get it in an e-mail?

Zach

[olePigeon]

It's also why pictographic languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, etc. are not any more difficult than learning a Latin based language.

[Buckaroo]

Oops, has this been discussed before?

[phantomdragonz]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

Oops, has this been discussed before?

I have seen versions of this as far back as four years ago... it's hard to search for as it's all garbled... it's cool I will admit... I am just being a party pooper...

Zach

[Dale Sorel]

fjkd asoieur dsfjdsjj hjfkdhlsau fdsnfdajk hufebnvdckl dhfjsi njfcnaoi fewkajh .

[ort888]

fcuk siht bctih dcik alsohse cnut

[Sealobo]

Originally Posted by phantomdragonz

OMG this crap again...

did you get it in an e-mail?

Zach

precisely my initial thought.

[tboparis]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

Cna yuo raed tihs? !

Yse iwht on rpolbme.

[OB1]

55?

Fascinating stuff. I love language, but I wish we were telepathic. Our reliance on language is a huge handicap.

[dcmacdaddy]

ndoensotms cjdndhes!!!!

That was my way of answering your question as to whether correct spelling matters. Do you understand what I said? If not, just ask me and I'll explain it to you. Or perhaps, we could have an agreed upon system for conveying information so that you would understand what I wrote above without needing a secondary explanation.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

Oops, has this been discussed before?

And debunked.

-t

[ghporter]

It takes far more cognitive effort to read misspelled or incomplete words than to read fully spelled, properly spelled words (with the exception of words you've never seen before that are also spelled oddly). Further, some people's processing works differently and they just cannot read incomplete or misspelled words-and this has nothing to do with dyslexia.

And we seem to deal with this topic every three or four months here...

[Peter]

[USB HUB]

I think it is interesting what the brain can interpret (I could actually read it). But as WTH said, this has been discussed too many times. And I just got CATS to actually look at his spelling and check it more often ... and now this!!! I'm running for the hills!!!! This would give him premise (in his mind) that it is okay to mispell... Heaven forbid.

[The Godfather]

Cambridge Schmambridge! I hope this researcher was not being paid by a federal grant.

[osiris]

It's pretty amazing how the brain works. The words actually look complete when you read quickly.

It must be Voodoo devil magic from hell.

[phantomdragonz]

Originally Posted by Peter

OMG, I almost forgot about that thing!

THANK YOU!

Zach

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by olePigeon

It's also why pictographic languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, etc. are not any more difficult than learning a Latin based language.

Nope, not true (assuming that by “Latin based language”, you mean a language that is represented by an alphabet-like writing system, not a language based on Latin).

First of all, Korean is an alphabet-like writing system, no different (basically) than the Latin one. Same goes for both Japanese kana systems (katakana and hiragana), though not kanji. So those two don’t fall under your category.

Secondly, ideographic (there are dozens of words for describing the various non-alphabet-like writing systems of the world, many of them only applicable to certain languages; I’m just being lazy and using ‘ideographic’ to represent them all. Similarly, I’ll use ‘phonographic’ to refer to all the alphabet-like ones, despite their differences) writing systems are harder to learn than alphabet-based ones. There’s a reason Chinese children rarely achieve fluent literacy till the age of 12 or so.

With phonographic systems, your brain partly relies on a specific image of a word that you’ve seen dozens of times before—but just as importantly, it relies on your instinctive knowledge of the grammar and syntactics of the language. You know what to expect next in a sentence (whether to expect a noun, a verb, an adjective, a participle, etc.), so therefore your eyes (well, brain) expects a word-shape that conforms to that expectation. It also relies on the fact that if you don’t immediately recognise the word as a familiar shape, you have a second option: to divide the word into smaller segments and stitch them together to form the full word.

With iconographic systems, however, the second option is more or less not an option (it is in a way in many systems, but not really in a comparable way). Also, since iconographic systems are very ill-suited to representing inflection or mutation of any kind (grammatical or otherwise), you lose a great part of the predictability that you have with word shapes. You still have an expectation as to what the following word ought to be, but for most systems, the writing won’t reflect that, so the image will come more slowly.

Also, iconographic systems tend to have a very large inventory of unique shapes, far more than phonographic systems. If you see a word such as ‘antidisestablishmentarialism’, which I’m sure you’ll agree is not a word you see often, your brain won’t have an image to fall back on. It will instantly recognise that this is a long, complicated word, and as such, it will break it up into sections and look for shapes within the shape, enabling you to read it quite quickly and with no difficulty. In iconographic systems, if you see a symbol you rarely (or never) see otherwise, you will have to active search your brain for anything to help you recognise the shape—and if it’s a shape you’ve never seen before, as I said above, you won’t have the option of putting it together piece by piece, because the shape is not the sum of its parts, as is the case (to varying degrees) in phonographic systems.

So, basically, while it doesn’t make much of a difference for everyday reading (the literate Chinese read Chinese as fast as we read English), the learning curve and the tools available when our literacy fails us are a lot different for the two types of system, with the phonographic ones having the definite benefit in both cases.

Edit: Damn, that was longer than I thought—that’s what happens when I start yappering about language stuff while watching Kill Bill: I lose my self-restraint and shortening-down abilities.

(Double-edit: it also makes me close my <b>s with </i>s)

[Ghoser777]

Owned:

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

Although it was a good example when my class was discussing linguistics when comparind what a computer can understand and what a human can understand.

[tooki]

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Language (Can You Raed Tihs?)

In any event, this is O-L-D, and so I am closing it.

To all: please check Snopes -- and our own lounge via search -- for things you get in forwarded emails. In all likelihood, they've been posted here before repeatedly and are thus unwelcome. (Never minding that most forwarded emails are pure fiction anyway, and thus already undesirable.)

tooki