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Letter variance

I thought recently about english words and a playful idea to shortcut words in writing by eliminating vowels.

Take the word backup as an example. After removing vowels it becomes bckp. I would bet you could guess what word is hidden under bckp if I didn’t tell you in the first place.

But what happens if we remove consonants? The word backup becomes au - really hard to tell what word is hidden there.

Try to guess more words: cmptr, mthd, ntbk, dllr. Funny to see that ppl can either be apple or people.

And if I were to remove vowels in the above words they would be: oue, eo, oeoo, oa.

How about short words, three-letter ones? cr, bd. A bit harder, isn’t it? A lot more prone to uncertainty: bd can be bad or bud or bed or bid…

I was wondering what does it take for us to be able to guess the word when parts of it are missing.

Is there any difference in the amount of information that the vowels and consonants carry in a word? Can it be that consonants carry more information than vowels?

Can we say that consonants contribute to the most variance in words?

Surely this also has something to do with lengths of words and a larger number of consonants than vowels. But maybe also with how our brains function and with the brain’s ability to interpolate through the missing information?

And what about speech? Which sounds contribute to carrying most information? Are they also sounds attributed to pronouncing consonants?