Re: Readability of scrambled text

On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 22:24:10 -0400, Nokta Kanto <red5_2@...> wrote:

>This is spreading the web like wildfire -- it ranks #2 on blogdex dot net
>now -- but I'll repost:
>
>"Aoccdrnig to rsereach at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht
>oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and
>lsat ltteres are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you
>can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey
>lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
Interesting. At first it looks like a few letetrs are swapepd around here
and there, but then if you stop to look at words like "iprmoetnt" and
"bcuseae" you can see that they're ptrtey wlel sramcbeld (and "iprmoetnt"
even subtistuets an "e" for whet sholud be an "a"!). Odldy enoguh, the wrod
taht was hadrset for me to raed is "Elingsh".

The weird thing is that the shápe of the words is all wrong, but it's still
readable. The descenders and ascenders are all in the wrong places. It
shoúld be a lot harder to read than it ís. I guess it must be a tough
anagram challenge for non-native English speakers, though.

>There's clearly some potential for an interesting and bizarre (and
>steganographic ;) conlang here. Each word would have a phonetic spelling,
>but additional meaning is carried in their scrambling of letters. Maybe
>vowels float to the head for emphasis, or the first two consonants switch
>and migrate right in the genitive case. Maybe metaphor is expressed by
>rearranging internal letters into different words... the possibilities are
>endless!
An interesting thing this suggests to me is that it could be worthwhile to
reduce words to their first and last letters when trying to choose a new
word for a meaning you have in mind. I wonder though if this would still
work for languages that have common inflections (like all nouns of a
particular declension ending in -a)?

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