Cindy Smart Knows Better Than To Say Naughty Words

D'Sphitz writes "Cindy Smart, the first doll in the world to be able to read, tell the time and do sums. Cindy Smart 'sees' via a camera located under a bee on her overalls and has a computer 'brain' that can recognise more than 600 words and objects, although she refuses to recite certain 4-letter words. 'We don't say those kind of words,' she shrills, refusing to even spell obscenities. 'That's a bad word.'" Sounds like a good candidate for a personality transplant.

Comments

recognizes more than 600 words or objects

[prichardson]

There are over 500,000 words in the english language. she recognizes slightly over .1% of them. I give her about 5 minutes reading any book with a decent vocabulary before she craps out. I know this is a toy, but memory isn't that expensive these days.

Re:recognizes more than 600 words or objects

[hazem]

You really don't need so many words to communicate effectively.

Doing a rudimentary word count of this current page of comments gave about 950 unique words, including mis-spellings, names, and e-mail addresses.

When I was studying Arabic, a 500 word vocabulary was a good benchmark to reach. 1000 words meant, barring grammar problems, that you could speak and read pretty proficiently.

I'm sure they're expecting kids will be putting kid-level pages up in front of the doll. With a controlled vocabulary, that might only include a vocabulary of a few hundred words.

imported vs. native words

[David Jao]

Why does 'intelligent' sound more sophisticated than 'smart'? Because it comes directly from french rather than Old English?

This phenomenon is not limited to English. Many other languages have the property that foreign imported words are more acceptable in polite company than native words.

For example, in Japanese, there are three major categories of words:

1. Native Japanese words, inherited from antiquity
2. Chinese words, imported roughly 1000 years ago
3. English words, imported since the 20th century and continuing to this day

In almost all cases the more recently imported words are more sophisticated than the older words. For example, the polite way to say restroom in Japanese is either "toire" (derived from the English word toilet) or "otearai" (imported from chinese, literally meaning "hand-wash"). There exist native Japanese words for restroom, but they connote dirtiness and one would never use them in polite company.

The three-level categorization of Japanese allows for more interesting observations than English's two level Latin/Germanic split. Note here that the most recent English import "toilet" can be used directly in polite speech, while the older Chinese import requires a euphemism and the original native words cannot be used at all. Compare this to native English, where "toilet" is one of the crudest possible ways to refer to a restroom. Familiarity breeds contempt, in any language.