Brain Oddities: Spelling is irrelevant to comprehension.

This article i have found is very interesting, it shows a very clever aspect of the human brain. This is a MUST read, you will see why.www.ritholtz.com...

reply to post by rogertom


With the spelling in most of the ATS post, you have to know this already.
Seeashrink

I im nat su shore I kin agre wuth aul thit.

Coobie rite.

reply to post by Stewie

Very good..... i kinda found your sentence harder to understand, than the article.

That's because he didn't do it correctly.

You are supposed to you the correct letters of the actual word, just jumbled up. and not to substitute them for others.

Besides with spell checker, who cares!!!

Yes, it's as simple as leaving the first and final letters of the word intact.

Amazingly enough, some languages do this for whole sentences. Where you may form a sentence with verbs, nouns, etc. and as long as you leave 1 or 2 concrete foundations to the sentence, it will still be readable. Spelling of verbs to change an entire sentence, for instance, is not important.

i.e.

Ran/Run, two totally different words with essentially the same meaning. Some languages can use simple grammar easily.

I've always thought English was one of the most disorganized languages on the planet. With so many words that have different definitions, but have the same pronunciation and spelling. Not an eloquent language at all.

I tinhk the pinot of the atrilce is taht if the lsat and frsit letrtes are in palce the biran can copmrhend waht it syas.

The beginning and end of the word are the important bits to the human brain (this is not a translation of above).

reply to post by SyphonX


Its still the most latinised of all european languages. I love the language - the more I learn about the origins of the words (Etymology) the more I enjoy it.

Interestingly, the only word I got wrong was "slpeling," which I thought of as "sleeping" at first. I wonder if people who just woke up or are tired would think the same.

I have often heard that english is the hardest language to learn, but some say french or chinese, does anyone know..

reply to post by rogertom


All languages are equal in "difficulty" or "easiness" depending on how you want to say it. There are some languages that are easier for English speakers to learn because they are related to English (such as German) or because they use a lot of similar big words (such as French or Spanish) or because they use the same lettering (which has nothing to do with learning the language, so much as becoming literate in it, which are different phenomena).

For a Chinese speaker, English would be easier than Spanish, despite the equal difference of writing between both. That is because Chinese and English are both analytical languages with simplistic morphology. Morphology is the way that words change (ran/run, for a basic example) to reflect meaning. Chinese has very little morphology, and syntax is totally important (syntax being the ordering of words in a phrase). Spanish, on the other hand, like Turkish, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Arabic and many others are all big on morphology, where words have multiple different endings creating different meanings. For example, in English and Chinese, the difference between "I run" and "You run" is wholly a matter of the appearance of the pronoun "I" or "you". In Spanish, on the other hand, the difference rests in the end of the word: corro (I run), corres (you run), corremos (we run), etc.

Also, for an English speaker, learning any related language, distant or proximate, is better than unrelated languages because of cognates. Cognates are words that have a similar phonology (sounds) and similar semantics (meaning), so for English, that would be languages as remote as Portuguese, Czech, Hindi and Persian (Farsi) - all related to English. Languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Chinese, Swahili, Yoruba, Japanese and Samoan do not share such similar words, so they are "harder" to learn.

All this of course, has to do with adult learners. Children, especially babies that have not even learned their first language yet, are all predisposed to learning any one of these languages with no difficulty.

reply to post by rogertom

This has been debunked. Here is a great little video from Wimp.com.
Sorry, I am fairly new to this and don't know yet how to post videos, I hope the link works.
wimp.com...

reply to post by rogertom


It's very silly to evaluate another's intelligence as well. I noticed this on YouTube, where if you mispell something, yo uare automatically wrong, according to most.

this is split brain technology !

honestly Lefties can read that just as easy, and for Leonardo's writing left handed people do not need a mirror...

It is actually more efficient for a left handed person.

cool topic

reply to post by rogertom


I discovered this some years ago, the key is to leave the first and last letter of the word in the correct place and mix up the rest of the letters.