Hu Neds Spelng?

[Merkin]

The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at

Cmabrigde Uinervtisy: It dseno't mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a

word are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is that the frsit and last ltteer

be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still

raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseaethe huamn mnid deos not raed

ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? Yaeh and

I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

[Lugnutz]

Que?

[Chris James]

Wow, I haven't talked like that since the sixties...it was probably after an all night party with free liquor.

[Merkin]

In the Sixties we would, of course, randomly throw 'far out' and 'cool' into most sentences.

[Camy]

not to mention Dude!

[colinian]

Ah, ys, bt ty rdng it ot ld ad se hw it cms ot.

Colin

[Lugnutz]

Ahhh. The short bus arrived.

[Chris James]

You know, James...if you read that paragraph aloud with a heavy Scottish accent it all makes sense! Ach Mon.

[Merkin]

Maybe so, but if I try to read Robert Burns aloud I bust a gut laughing and he still doesn't make any sense.

[colinian]

I've never tried that, James. I like to laugh, and doing so when I'm reading makes my housemates ask what I'm reading that's so funny. Imaging their surprise when they are handed Robert Burns! Thanks for the tip.

Colin

[Chris James]

Just a note: I think Des is losing control Down Under. Either that or there are some Aussies with entirely too much time on their hands doing things like this:

http://now.msn.com/paul-mathis-australian-entrepreneur-developed-th-instead-of-the

And he has the nerve to label himself an entrepreneur.

[Merkin]

That Aussie is about eleven hundred years too late:

The word ye as in Ye Olde Booke Shoppe, is simply an archaic spelling of the definite article the. The use of the letter Y was a printer's adaptation of the eth, ð, the character in the Old English alphabet representing the th- sounds (th) and (t) in Modern English; Y was the closest symbol in the Roman alphabet. Originally, the form would have been rendered as yⁿ or y^e. (The pronunciation (yē) today is a spelling pronunciation.)

From Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary,

[Nick Deverill]

And in the runic alphabet is 'th'. A friend and I actually learnt the mostly Anglo-Saxon runes in the Hobbit and we used to send each other private notes that others could see and hadn't a clue what we were talking about.

Pretty simple alphabet to learn, only took us an evening and the security factor was the fact that no one else tumbled to the fact there were a few other single characters for two letters of English, so the length of words was wrong thus foiling schoolboy code breaking.