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"Pyalnig wtih langguae"
09/16/2003 Entry
(Read: Playing with language)
Kieran started an interesting discussion over at Crooked Timber about our ability to make sense of words when they are not written in the way we are used to.
The basic idea is that apparently we don't have too much trouble reading a text (at least in English) even when the letters in words are presented in random order as long as the first and last letters are in their place. Let's try it: Floolwnig tihs txet sulohd not be too difucfilt. (Read: Following this text should not be too difficult.)
Kieran makes an excellent point: this is likely true for English partly because so many of the common words are short, often no longer than three letters (which can only be written in one way as per the above rule).
On a related note: someone once told me that there is a word for how easy it is to understand a language even if some parts are missing (there is a word for the score the language gets on that). Hungarian has a LOT of accent marks on letters such as é, í ö, ú, ü. (I don’t just say “accents” because once a mark is added it actually counts as a different letter.) But many people have no energy to bother with those when typing. In most cases, it is pretty straight forward to read Hungarian text (for those fluent in the language in any case:) without those marks. It’s unclear whether other accented languages like German are just as easy to read in that way (some are probably easier than others). it’s another interesting way of tweaking the language (granted, not quite as interesting as mixing up the words).
On a sidenote.. this little exercise makes it even more important for people to know how to spell. After all, how do you mix up a word if you don't know what letters are supposed to go into the salad?
Replies: 2 Comments have been posted, click here to see them and add your own
Hell o,
You can read German text without extended characters, however it would take a bit more time. Like as it can happen in Hungarian, sometimes it's completely different if you write "nemi" or "némi"... I really hope our nice - and unique - õ and û characters will survive. Since almost all of the Windows based programs use Unicode, it requires only a little effort...
Levente
Posted by Levente @ 09/19/2003 11:12 AM CST
Seconding the comment on German. Also, German has the option of converting the umlauted letters to the original letter followed by an e, so it actually converts easily to basic ascii.
On some very old Hungarian lists - usenet or similar - I remember there was a convention to put numbers immediately after the vowels to signify the diacritical marks. Has this survived anywhere?
Posted by Doug @ 09/24/2003 01:44 PM CST
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