But how ? Here we go ... I'm doing this live, without any preparation or cheating by the way ...we'll just see what happens...
First, we get a bit of German text ...a story will do ... oh ...here's one ( down there, in red italics) ... we pick a word at random ...let's have "Sie" on that first line ... pick the "s" at the beginning...done ... now we trundle along until we find the next "s" ... aha, in the very next word ...and there's an "a" after it ... so we've got "sa" so far .... that's a good start. We wander along to find the next "a" ... there it is 3 words from the end .... and there's a "u" after it ..we'll have that ... we've now got "sau" ......that's OK ... we move on and find the next u .... two words on ... it's got a "k" after it .... and now we've got "sauk" ..not a good one!!
Die Küchenuhr Wolfgang Borchert Sie sahen ihn schon von weitem auf sich zukommen, denn er fiel auf. Er hatte ein ganz altes Gesicht, aber wie er ging, daran sah man, dass er erst zwanzig war. Er setzte sich mit seinem alten Gesicht zu ihnen auf die Bank. Und dann zeigte er ihnen, was er in der Hand trug. Das war unsere Küchenuhr, sagte er und sah sie alle der Reihe nach an, die auf der Bank in der Sonne saßen.
We got a genuine 3-letter German word though ... Sau = pig.
Now we could start again, but what I usually do is, if the next letter is crap, I go past it ...let's try it .... so let's move on the the next "u" instead ...where we get an "f" .... sauf ...that's Ok ...
The other thing you can do, is you just pick another starter word and try again ... so let's pick "wie" in the 2nd line .... we've got a "w" now .... we go to the next "w" and find an "a" after the w in zwanzig, then we find an "r" after the a in war, so we've got a good 3-letter word already ( war) ...let's try further ... we now find an "e" after the r in "unsere" .
Notice, by the way, that when I was looking for an "r" I didn't count the "r" in "er" in the very next word (er) because there's no letter following it.
So far we have "ware" and next we pick up the "n" after the "e" in the next word .... now we have "waren" pretty good !
Well, we've made two real German words ... so it shows that we're on the right track. But what we really want is new ones !! Words that look like German words but aren't.
Well, If we start with the "E" from the Er in the 2nd line, the n we get "eicht" which looks pretty German but isn't. Going further with it you get eichte .... eichtere .... eichteren ... eichterend ...all of which are at least plausible.
One of the mind-boggling things about this algorithm is that you could get hundreds
of "words" out of that tiny bit of a story. It's a bottomless pit really.
Anyhow ... here's WSH and "Soundso" ... toll !!