Posted by Gene E. Bloch on 12/26/67 11:32

"John F. Miller" <johnATenosoft.net> wrote in
news:11nq55lianent75@corp.supernews.com:

> Your effective decline into misspelling reminds me of this article
> (http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/)
>
> Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't
> mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt
> tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The
> rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit
> porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter
> by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
>
> In turn, it also reminds me that vowels are somewhat pointless.
> For example:
>
> Th frst scn f th ply ntrdcs s t wrld f wlthy, ppr-clss Chrstn mn
> lvng n Vnc. Thr cnvrstn rvls tht thy r mn f bsnss wh tk grt rsks
> wth mny nd r crfl t vd smng vrly cncrnd bt thr nvstmnts. Fr xmpl,
> ntn clmly dns hs sscts' sggstn tht h s wrrd bt hs shps, nd Slr's
> dscrptn f shpwrck, wth slks nrbng th rrng wtrs nd spcs scttrd pn
> th strm, s lyrcl nd ptc rthr thn prctcl r bsnss-mndd.
>

I'm having a heck of a time reading the vowel-moved text (couldn't
resist that).

In Hebrew and Arabic, where most vowels are not normally written,
their writing schemes do have two advantages over what you wrote.

One is that in those two languages, the grammar rather than the root
word determines the vowels, at least to some (pretty major) extent.

The second is that when a syllable starts with a vowel, there is a
sort of empty consonant symbol to indicate the presence of the
vowel. That lack was the worst part of the vowel-free text above.

Thus, something like '&s', '&f', and '&ppr' would have helped me
decode 'us', 'of', and 'upper' much quicker. 'T' and 'th' are no
problem, since a vowel after the letter is expected. That also helps
distinguish between such situations as '&s' and 's', as in 'as',
'is', 'us' on the one hand, and 'so', 'see', 'say' on the other.

I don't think vowel-free writing works well in English :-). BTW,
Persian (Farsi), like Englush and Indo-Europena language, uses the
Arabic writing scheme, and it works very badly there, I am told.

I have seen the other stuff before; also, I am, for no particular
reason, very quick at decoding anagrams even when the first and last
letters are in the wrong places, so I read that pretty quickly and
easily. I also usually - but NOT always - do the Jumble puzzle in my
local newspaper very quickly :-).

Gino

--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom"

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