Mystery Number One - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 19

A popular example is the Eskimo language Inuit, said to have something like
fifty different words for snow (Boas 1911). In English translation, these would
have to be paraphrased, for example, as soft snow, hard snow, fresh snow,
old snow, white snow, grey snow, and snow pissed on by a baby seal . 6
A precondition for adequate paraphrasing is a proper knowledge of the foreign
notion to be described. As an example consider the first Eskimo faced with the
task of introducing the notion of an electric coffee grinder into Inuit.

2.2 Modality-Dependent Unanalyzed External Surfaces

As an agent-oriented approach, DBS provides two basic perspectives from
which communicating with natural language may be analyzed, namely inter-
nal and external . The internal (or endosystem) perspective is based on one's in-
trospection as a native speaker, and has been illustrated in the previous section
by an example of communication failure in a foreign language environment.
The external (or exosystem) perspective is that of a scientist (cf. NLC'06, Sect
1.4) working to reconstruct the language communication mechanism as an ab-
stract theory, verified by an implementation as an artificial agent with language
(talking robot).
The following example illustrates the external perspective with two agents,
A and B. A is in the speak mode and produces the modality-dependent unana-
lyzed external word form surface water . B is in the hear mode and recognizes
this surface. 7

2.2.1 P RODUCTION AND RECOGNITION OF A WORD

cogitive agent B cognitive agent A

match surface realize surf a ce

water water water

lexical lookup copy surface

unanalyzed
external
surface

water

water

external world

hear mode speak mode

6 See Pullum (1991), “The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.”
7 For a refined version see 2.6.1.