![]() ![]() And if he "knew," by the way, it seems to me that believing a dog can process (little emotionless robots that they are) "I want to do this thing and he doesn't like for me to. If it were inflection, how would he figure out what was being forbidden? He didn't "know" I didn't want him going in the water, because normally it's ok. It was an observation, no more imperative than a remark about the weather. But if so, those odor molecules dispersed real fast. No leash to imperceptibly tug, and he wasn't even looking at me to pick up the subtle body language with which dogs manage to comprehend the meaning of "Lassie, go to the shed and get the third wrench on the left from the lower tool rack, oil it and bring it to the guy under the sink." Maybe I smelled of disapproval. And I didn't, contrary to what the nervous behaviorists like to think, give him a subliminal cue. The behavorists' last resort, that he changed his own mind coincidentally with my comment, may be the answer, but the shift was too immediate for that to sound convincing. But I didn't say that I spoke to him as if he were a human with a fully robust vocabulary and human creative language skills. It follows the principles of dog communication I'm about to describe. Normally, I would have said, "No water." That's clear, unambiguous, and couched in the lexicon every dog learns. No big deal until you try to figure out what, exactly, he understood. I said casually, "We can't go in the water today." He turned immediately and came back. ![]() He was not on a leash, and I was not paying my usual close attention. As it happened, the lake was nearly drained and he would have had to traverse a ten-foot stretch of mud to get to the water. One day when Crom and I were walking along a lakeside, he veered toward the lake, obviously planning to take a quick dip, which is normally fine with me. In fact, I would argue that linguistic "understanding" must include the ability to handle new linguistic events: unfamiliar vocabulary, garbled syntax, bad grammar, unfamiliar concepts. Do you understand what I am asking? "Understanding" is vastly extended beyond vocabulary. If I were to say to you, "Have you garbled the twister?" I would be using five words you understand in a grammatical sentence. Likewise, "Sorry for the words" doesn't sound human either, and we aren't absolutely sure what it means: "Hope you understand?" "I'd rather wag my tail, but I can't do that on the computer." "I know I'm not saying this very well." "Please excuse the garbled vocabulary." That last may seem like the "best" paraphrase, but his confident remark about the spell checker actually suggests that he doesn't know about the garbling of the vocabulary. That is to say, "Thank you for helping my dad be older" is not a construction any human would use, although an English speaker can figure out, with a little context, what it means. Three are "human" sentences ("Thank you for the meat,"."I tried to say it right", and "Good thing I have spell checking") and two are "dog" sentences. There's a message of thirty-three words, sixteen of them spelled wrong (or are they?) If you fix the "spelling", what remains is five sentences (I'm counting the compound as two). Thin cue for the meet, and for hell ping my dead bee odor. I've changed one detail, pretending that her name is Kathy: The circumstance was that she had sent her leftover beef scraps home for him from my birthday lunch. To illustrate my point about the meaning of meaning, consider an email that Crom recently sent to a woman we know. How does one count a dog vocabulary? And what does "understanding a word" mean? Do dogs "understand" the words 'a', 'the', and 'an'? They usually understand 'get', which is defined by one of the longest entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. I never considered, till now, the dubiousness of the "statistic" itself. I used to point out what a rich vocabulary six hundred words might be, given reliable statistics which suggest that 90% of all English discourse involves a vocabulary of about one thousand words. Six Hundred Words - Developing a Lexicon for DogsĪn old saw in the books about training dogs is that they can only understand about six hundred words. ![]()
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