When I first read the Heir to the Empire series I always thought Grand Admiral Thrawn’s name was Thawrn. Not entirely sure why, but this thought persisted for years until I started talking to people who had also read the books. My parody of the characters here is a Duro rather than a Chiss simply because there is not Chiss head yet, at least officially, and the Duro head is as close as we get.
Funny thing here is that in your comic I read the name as “Thrawn” until I read your commentary. I once read that if a word starts and ends with the usual letters and has all the expected ones in between–no matter what order they’re in–the brain will still read the word correctly. Not sure that true, but interesting if so.
Interestingly enough, one has to be taught how to read, write, and speak the letters and the syllables that vocalize them first, so that probably has something to do with the function that interprets the characters of a word. People’s brains are like complicated computers and they use a dictionary function to recognize words. A function many a programmer probably wishes they had better control over! 😀
The brain evaluates new experiences, which includes new words, according to their similarity to previous experiences. In primitive man this probably helped him survive more often than it did not and so it was preserved, but it can be tricked.
No, brain doesn’t use dictionary function to recognize words, unless you are still learning to read. Brain uses general pattern recognition. If an image is similar to some known pattern, it is evaluated as that pattern. If matching patterns for whole word fails, smaller patterns – separate letters – are matched.
Note: Experts for AI would probably kill for computer function capable of recognizing patterns as good as humans. Actually, they kill even for bees pattern recognition, luckily only the bees.
This is in fact the case. I forget which group it was that researched this, but it has been discovered that humans read word by word, rather than letter by letter. The rsuelt is taht we can sitll mkae snese of wrods that hvae the letetrs miexd up as lnog as the fsirt and lsat letrtes are in the rgiht plcae. Neat, huh?
He has my vote! Well, unless the next guy promises chocolate sundaes on Mondays.
Changed name and changed species. Originality.
I assumed that the pun was the better name when the neighbor kids first got into the extended verse, so we ended up calling thrawn, thorne, more than half the time.
‘Thorne is attacking our flanks’
‘That Thorne is always digging at our sides’
…
You get the picture, he made for fun puns when mispronounced, I expect this tradition to be present here.