Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy,it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmotnt 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.
Aren't our brains cool!?
I got sent that in an email last night I was really impressed! I showed Ewan too and he was kinda scared by it :P
It is rather amazing though
I actually didn't realise that the words were jumbled up until half way through 😮
that's cool 😃
Good one 😊
Does it work for all languages using the western alphabet?
Or any others that dont?
It is amazing, yes.
The effect is there for all languages with western alphabet as far as I know. We read in chunks.
But there are languages, such as Finnish for example, where the word changes according to it's meaning, so in order to understand the meaning, you need to read more chunks of it.
Example: 'lattialla' in Finnish means 'on the floor' in English. 'Lattia' means 'floor' and the last letters (suffix) '-lla' contain the meaning 'on'. You can say 'lattialta' meaning 'off the floor' or 'lattialle' 'onto the floor' etc. Notice the little differences in the last few letters? In English the word 'floor' remains the same all the time, the meaning is added with prepositions and such, and you can scramble the letters of the word 'floor' all you want and still get the idea. In Finnish you cannot scramble the suffix without scrambling the meaning.
Did I make any sense? 😃
Anyway, I have no clue how this effect works in chinese or other languages where one symbol contains the whole word.
That was interesting. Thank you.
I think the Chinese are exempt. As they don't have a first and last letter 😉
However Chinese is interesting as their are many different dialects and languages that use the same symbols. Hence even if you can't understand what someone is saying if you write it down the other person will be able to read it as its not phonetic. This is often causes confusion when we go over there as we cant understand them so they write it down and expect us to be able to read it!
Chinese has problems though difficulty with keyboards is an obvious one but creating a dictionary is another as they dont have an alphabetic order. I think they just classify words by groups e.g. a list of all birds.
There's a similar but opposite problem with Gaelic in Scotland. There are five different versions of Gaelic, all mutually comprehensible when spoken, but not when written, so it makes printing things like newspapers difficult, but television and radio isn't a problem. Weird huh?
It works in Hungarian (translation received in an email). The suffixes in the Hungarian language are placed in the main word, just like LAuRA described in connection with Finnish (no wonder,we supposed to belong the same language family 😉 I don't have any problem with reading it in Hungarian though and I tested it on my colleagues and they also managed to read it.
There is a similar effect being introduced via TXTing, such that, e.g., THNK B4 U TXT makes sense to anyone under the age of 60 or thereabouts.
On a separate thought, Russian, Latvian, Polish, Spanish etc are phonetic languages and spelled as they are pronounced. Jumbling letter orders there would change the actual pronunciation, so I don't think the trick would work as cleanly.
On the converse side, it is often quite a challenge to read emails or texts from said countries, as those not too familiar with English will spell words phonetically back; bearing in mind that they probably speak with a heavy accent, it sometimes takes a while to figure out what the original message was!
hello. i understand that u were demonstrating what u meant by you writing. thats ok, i read it and understood but i really want to know want u meant in that mesage or why u wrote that. have a nice day. Kaycee