Scrambling in internet folklore
Back at the dawn of modern time, when LLP still had that new plaza
smell, Mark Liberman
examined
a widely circulated item about what was said to be research at
Cambridge University on the comprehensibility of text in which letters
inside words had been scrambled, leaving the first and last letters in
place. The claim was that such scrambled text was astonishingly
comprehensible: TIHS IS AZANMIG!
Apparently, nothing dies on the internet. Things propagate and then
retreat, but are always ready to revive in force. We might be
entering a resurgent phase of the Cambridge Scrambling Tale; my e-mail
suggests that after three or four years in hibernation it's awake and
abroad again.
So if you've recently gotten one of the versions of this internet
folktale, go back and look at Mark's 2003 posting and at
the piece
by Matt Davis (which Mark cited), especially at its "update 2" section,
where Davis looks at relevant psycholinguistic research and notes that
the material in the mailings seems to have been carefully chosen to be
comprehensible.
I have little to add to Davis's discussion, except to note that (as I
wrote to a friend at the time):
... lots of the versions have typos in
them! For example, the second word in your version [which began:
"The phaomnnehil pweor of the hmuan mnid"] is "phaomnnehil", which
lacks one "e" and has an extra "h". It looks like someone was
doing the letter transpositions by hand, rather than using a
random-transposition scheme, which is what any actual researcher would
do.
The second sentence had "rscheearch" (with an extra
"ch") and "iprmoetnt" (with "e" instead of "a"). That's three
erroneous words in the first 28 words, and most of those 28 words were little
ones. At that point I gave up checking the text.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 27, 2007 02:08 PM