Quote:
Originally posted by Jeff Waegelin
Honestly, I don't think it has anything to do with the internet. It has everything to do with how the human brain recognizes words. When we look at a word, we focus on the first and last letter, and sortof glaze over the letters in the middle. As long as they're there, we can understand the word. So, that's the real cause, not people being used to misspellings because of the Internet. Now, not that you're wrong about the Internet being a bad thing for the English language... but this particular phenomenon is not really connected.
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Ok, I can agree with most of what you have all said. However, I want to add a slightly different observation. We generally interpret a word based on its consonants. Vowels are used, after, to differentiate among words with similar consonants and to allow us to speak the words more easily. Or to better use 2 or 3 consonants (d,r: dare, door, adore, aired, arid, dire, [etc]). smthng vry ntrstng. Many scrambled words have vowels that have been moved around, but not many consonants; therefore, the general pattern of consonants can still be determined and from that the word itself. What percentage of the words we use in the english language have consonants as both the first and last characters? Which type of word is harder to descramble: ones having the first and last characters as consonants; the first character as a consonant and the second character as a vowel; the first character as a vowel and the second character as a consonant; or the first and last characters as vowels? Try moving around the consonants of a scrambled word and then look at how much longer it takes to figure out what the word is. Increase the length of the word and then, again, observe how long it takes to determine what the word is. Of course, we are assuming that these are words we have seen before. Most new words that are scrambled will remain a jumble to most people, but some new words with only their vowels removed can be deciphered. We are also assuming that the words are primarily composed of consonants, not vowels. And that the words are fairly short. Somewhat of a contradiction to a point I made, but thats ok. In conclusion, I just said something approaching nothing. Carry on.
crarhteacs = ?