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Spell chequer Martha Snow Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a qu
by lb1lf 10y ago
Spell chequer
Martha Snow
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
It's letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
- bradbeattie 10y agoIs this where you start considering ngrams probabilities? Curious as to the best approach to this, as it's clear we can all read the above.
- agd 10y agoIn a way, I'm surprised I can read this so easily. Do our brains read by converting text to sounds, and then parsing the sounds?
- nkrisc 10y agoAs a native English speaker, I found my self reading it and then having to back-track by a few words to say them aloud in my head to discern the intended meaning as it was the sound of the words that was important, not the meaning of the word shape. The second time I read it through it was much easier.
- schoen 10y agoKind of a controversial issue whether this is always the case, but it's at least commonly or typically the case for many readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
- lb1lf 10y agoI was pondering the same thing; also, I wonder whether not being a native English speaker makes it easier or harder to read it - English is my third language and I found I could read it without any problems. I think I've read somewhere that reading is basically done by the brain registering the first and last few letters in a word, then just checking whether the ones in the middle are more or less what you expect and where you'd expect them. (In other words - if the start and/or end of a word is altered, your reading speed and comprehension should take a nosedive compared to just messing with the letters in the middle) If there is some truth to that, it would go a long way towards explaining why we can read it with as little trouble as we do.
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoHonestly it took me a minute before my brain started to be able to read it a lot better. At least it was very slow because everything is so wrong. So I don't know how common either of our experiences are but I am your contrary :)
- dsr_ 10y agoEarly reading is taught that way. You may have heard of "Phonics" as an element of literacy? Full literacy in alphabetic-phonetic languages includes the steps of (1) no longer sounding out words aloud and (2) no longer sounding out most words in your head, but rather grasping the shape of the word immediately.
- fallous 10y agoIt's the jump from word-as-sound to word-as-symbol, which I think a lot of people never make, partially because it's not particularly useful in their lives. I suspect those involved in programming skew very much towards the word-as-symbol, but whether that is causative or correlative I can't say.
- lb1lf 10y agoI definitely belong to the word-as-symbol camp when reading in my native Norwegian. Besides, I am a programmer (A shoddy one in all but assembly language, though...) Interestingly, perhaps, is that I recently made the transition from word-as-sound to word-as-symbol in another language - morse code; that felt very odd while it was going on - I have parsed words character by character for a couple of decades, and suddenly, I found my decoding lagging further behind - I had started hearing words as units, rather than composites of characters. Funnily enough, it was through no conscious effort - just happened, over the course of a few hours.
- SamBam 10y agoI had to explicitly read it "aloud" in my head, in a way that I don't do when reading other text. I can generally read text very quickly without having to hear it in my head, and in this case it was impossible.
- fallous 10y agoI think many people do have brains that operate this way, probably because their understanding of language is grounded in conversation as a first experience. I suspect this is the reason you see confusion with "your, you're" and "there, their, they're." I don't parse language in quite that manner, and even in speaking I have a different "mouth feel" for those homonyms. This creates a modest inversion of the idea of spelling errors for me, in that people who truly do say homonyms in such a way that to my hearing it is exactly the same require me to parse for context.
- schoen 10y ago> I don't parse language in quite that manner, and even in speaking I have a different "mouth feel" for those homonyms. I believe in the (somewhat controversial) non-subvocalization-based text processing and even think I do it myself, but I'm wondering if you could describe more about the "mouth feel" issue. Do you mean that you believe that you pronounce them using different phonology (that another person would potentially be able to hear), that your muscles are doing something different but not in a way that makes an auditory difference, or simply that you're subjectively aware of the spelling while speaking but not necessarily in a way that makes a physically-observable difference? Or is it not quite clear which of these is the case? I think this is an interesting question in the philosophy of language and also in the psychology of reading. (I've thought about this myself but haven't studied the academic literature about it.) If your answer is the first one, I wonder if you'd be willing to make an audio recording of yourself pronouncing these words that might show what difference you experience. By the way, there are documented cases where spelling differences have created new pronunciation differences that didn't previously exist in the spoken language. Maybe something like that has been happening in your idiolect?
- khedoros 10y agoI have a similar feeling, when I pronounce a homonym/homophone. The word "mouth feel" resonates for me, although I suspect that sometimes it's just an awareness of the spelling of the word. Other times, I'll consciously choose to pronounce a word differently to try to disambiguate it. I'll say "aunt" as "ant"/"ont" (read those second as phonetically-spelled Californian American pronunciations) depending on the situation and flow of the sentence. "They're" is usually "They-er", "their" is sometimes "thur" (like "fur" with a /ð/), and "there" feels like it's pronounced the expected way. "To" might be "tə", but "two" and "too" never are. Of course, that's all when I'm paying close attention to what I say. I'm sure there are times that I go against those. Also, sorry for the mix of layman phonetic spelling and IPA.
- Tloewald 10y agoYou should read Feersum Endjinn
- smnscu 10y agoI thought you came up with it on the spot but it's a real thing. http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/martha-snow.html http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/martha-snow.html
- clentaminator 10y agoLove it. It also reminds me of the poem The Chaos, by Gerard Nolst Trenité: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
- s-phi-nl 10y agoAlong similar lines, "The King's English" http://holyjoe.org/poetry/anonA.htm http://holyjoe.org/poetry/anonA.htm
- clentaminator 10y agoThanks for posting this. It's just as much of a tongue twister as The Chaos :)
- schoen 10y agoRelated: https://trialbysteam.com/2010/03/09/d-j-enright-the-typewriter-revolution/ https://trialbysteam.com/2010/03/09/d-j-enright-the-typewrit... (it's pretty subtle to catch all of the often-scatological jokes in there)
- votr 10y agoYou sound like a character from a Dickens novel.
- stronglikedan 10y agoHer spell checker works great, but it looks like she needs a grammar checker too.
- Grue3 10y agoThat poem could've been written about speech recognition software as well.
- mmanfrin 10y agoI had a surprisingly hard time reading this; but I don't subvocalize, and words are 'things' to me (for example, your/you're is read differently in my head and makes me very sensitive to that mistake).
- petercooper 10y agoI think it's cool how you can tell the writer's accent from this - something you can rarely do with written English. "halve" and "kin knot" sound nothing like "have" or "cannot" in my native accent, for example. Similarly, rhymes in Shakespeare's sonnets have been used to work out how Shakespeare spoke the same words, as we no longer pronounce the words the same way (and many of the rhymes have been broken).