Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

 
As sentence scrambling has become a popular pursuit, I thought I'd keep in with the in-crowd by posting this:

"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe."


Looking at this, it's interesting that grammar and structure, the elements of language Chomsky and Pinker would suggest as most intuitive are what allow us to read the sentence normally. Here's a summation of the research behind this;

"Two researchers from California show that people find spoken sentences intelligible -- even if every part of the sentence is played backwards. Moreover, people can learn to perceived time-reversed word-fragments as intelligible words. The secret is that even though each individual part of the sentence is played backwards, the structure of the sentence is preserved. Listeners get the meaning not only from the words, but the overall modulation of the sentence."


Continuing with language related matters, I seem to have fallen into the habit of noting occasional stories relating to the Sapir-Lee Whorf hypothesis;

"Speakers of different languages used different gestures to depict the same event... This appeared to reflect the way the structure of their languages expressed that event. For example, when describing a scene where Sylvester swings on a rope, the English speakers used gestures showing an arc. The Japanese and Turkish speakers tended to use straight gestures showing the motion but not the arc. Dr Kita suggests this is because Japanese and Turkish have no verb that corresponds to the English intransitive verb 'to swing'. "

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posted by Richard 9:21 pm