>It could be a budding ubran leegd. There is also a script on Perlmonks that
>can rprducoee the eefcft.
>
>bb
Looks like Bill's on target about this being an urban legend, although there
seems to be some research basis as well. A quick Googling of "Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy" turned up this interesting site: "Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey"
(http://www.bisso.com/ujg/), where the following can be found:
[quote]
September 14, 2003
c-n y-- r--d th-s?
Languagehat has an entry concerning the decipherability of English texts made
up of words that have had their letters scrambled (except for the first and
last). [via Avva in Russian] I had written something about this phenomenon
back in March with a different scrambled text. (I am always amazed how these
unattributed texts can spread like folklore across the Web.) It was hard at
the time to find a source for the quoted text, but I think I've traced it back
to some work that Kourosh Saberi at UC Irvine and David R. Perrott at Cal
State Los Angeles have done, mentioned here in an article by D. W. Massaro at
UC Santa Cruz. I sent some email to Professor Saberi, but hadn't heard back
from him. They wrote up their results in the 29 April 1999 issue of Nature,
but I've been unable to find it online. Here's a press release for that
article; see also this editorial in Nature Science Update.
[Addendum 09/15/03: The jumbled letters meme continues to spread. In good
folkloric fashion, I've seen two variants: the first with "Aoccdrnig to a
rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy" and the second with "Aoccdrnig to
rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy". Here's another reference to the Saberi
and Perrott article on the ABCNEWS dot com site.]
...
September 17, 2003 50-millisecond segments
Linguistics Intrepid reader, Roger Willcocks, has discovered the origin of the
first jumbled text that mentions Saberi. A letter to the New Scientist on May
1, 1999, in response to a short item on the Saberi and Perriott Nature article
(online at the New Scientist) site. The letter's writer, Mr Graham Rawlinson
of Aldershot, Hampshire, also mentions his dissertation, written in 1976 at
Nottingham University, where he "showed that randomising letters in the middle
of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to
understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors
in an A4 page of muddled text". Roger also found this Usenet (alt.2600 group)
posting (from June 7, 1999) that mentions the letter but gives no further
details. I'm not so sure we'll discover the writer of the second and more
recent text, but maybe. Thanks, Roger.
[Addendum 09/17/03: Rawlinson's dissertation is called The significance of
letter position in word recognition. Found it in the University of Nottingham
online library catalog. I'll try to find a copy on this side of the big pond.]
...
[/quote]
Jim
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