That's true, but it's not at all what he said What he implied from culture, I took to mean a polymorphic mapping of "sentences" or "units of communication" in

That's true, but it's not at all what he said What he implied from culture, I took to mean a polymorphic mapping of "sentences" or "units of communication" in a given understood context that can be learned only through experience. it doesn't stop humans from picking up second languages or from understanding older texts in their native languages It doesn't stop them, but it is far from trivial to learn a new language or to even resolve syntactic,lexical, or sematic ambiguity without context, even in a native speakers language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity. The ill-posed nature of this mapping is not static, and for people not speaking their native language or young children this becomes the basis for some forms of comedy. As far as I know we have no generic grammar that can generate the rules for all languages; there is no universal "interpreter", and it is not certain that "concept" can be decoupled from "phrase" or "sentence" without context, so I don't think your separation of "library" and "interpreter" holds.