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Comment by sushid | Hacker News Reader

Snopes doesn't definitely prove or disprove it but I don't think there ever was a paper that was published. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/can-you-raed-tihs/

It's also nearly impossible to read longer words so I doubt it. e.g. Cigdrbame Uietisrnvy is nearly impossible to read.

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I think for native speakers deciphering that that says Cambridge University isn't all that difficult and doesn't require much mental energy.

If you were primed for it by the earlier post, sure, but if you saw it out of the blue I doubt you'd know what it sefgiiind.

It's not hard to understand what it signifies though.

Most likely but doesn't that prove the point that reading is ultimately heavily context based and provided enough context you can distort the letters themselves to some absurd lengths and still preserve meaning?

Sure, writing has very low entropy, but the claim that you can easily tell what a word is as long as you preserve the first and last letters seems false.

Longer words seem to work OK if you add another constraint: keep all letters with ascenders and descenders in roughly the same relative order, eg, Cmbadigre Uisrevitny. Also, it works much better in a whole paragraph.

I think an important part is that ascenders and descenders are in approximately the same position as before.

> Cigdrbame Uietisrnvy

Sounds like a Welsh-Russian couple ...

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