Re: A stupid text trick - Example of the redundancy of English text

From: Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensilta_at_xortec.fi)
Date: 09/17/03 

Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 11:28:15 +0300

Michael Amling wrote:

> John A. Malley wrote:
>
>> This is such a marvelous example of English language entropy/character
>> I must share it with sci.crypt. A friend sent me this today:
>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Subject: Dslyecixs taek haret
>>
>> Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deson't mttaer in
>> waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
>> 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 lteetr by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> Isn't that great? :-)
>>
>> Native English speaker/readers should have no trouble parsing the text
>> because of the redundancy of printed English. Only the first and last
>> letters of each word remain in their expected positions.
>
>
> I would be curious to know how difficult to read our various
> non-native English readers, contributors and lurkers find the above.
> E.g. Cristiano?

I found the text remarkably easy to comprehend. I'm a fast reader and I
don't - and I suspect most fast readers don't - usually read the whole
word at all, only enough of it to identify it, which is usually very
easy. The ease is due to context, predictable sentence structure, and so
forth. I would think the text might be utterly incomprehensible to
someone not fluent in English or not used to reading fast, let alone to
those poor people who read letter-by-letter.

The context is obviously very important, since even with the first and
last letters intact there usually are more than one possible
rearrangement of letters that make a single word intelligile, but almost
all of the alternatives are excluded by their being semantically or
grammatically non-sensical. For example, the title of the text could be
"dyslecxics teak heart" - but that makes no sense.

As to confusing automatic indexing engines - they are confusing, aren't
they -, the semantical constraints placed on retrieving the correct word
might not be easy to implement. 

-- 
Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensilta@xortec.fi)
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen"
  - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus