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From: Paul Wolff <bounceme@thiswontwork.wolff.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: 7 Words That Dogs Can Understand (And 4 That No Dog Can)
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:03:06 +0000
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On Thu, 6 Mar 2025, at 06:46:28, Hibou posted:
>Le 02/03/2025 à 18:16, Judith Latham a écrit :
>>
>> A dog can understand 7 words. How many barks does a human understand?
>> I'll bet it's less than 7. [...]
>
>It all depends on the meaning of 'to understand'. Words are not simple 
>things to us. They have denotations and connotations, may conjure up 
>memories, chunks of knowledge and history (moon, Nazi, empire, 
>slavery...). They have spellings and pronunciations, declensions and 
>conjugations, may belong to certain registers and dialects.... Humans 
>know this. We use our languages with a wealth of understanding.
>
>Dogs don't. They simply don't have the mental apparatus for it. When 
>they recognise and respond to 'sit', 'fetch', or 'wait', it's more like 
>a human responding to a kettle clicking off when it's finished boiling.
>
>What's really astonishing is that we do have the apparatus. Humans are 
>extraordinary beings, the product of long and tortuous evolution that 
>may have few parallels in in the Universe. I find this a sobering 
>thought.
>
When we talk of the numbers of /anything/ in the universe, I start by 
counting the number of galaxies we have seen, and start multiplying from 
there.

But as for dogs, and being a chemist by education, I was very impressed 
by Six-Thirty. Over a thousand English words, we were told. And he was 
said to have been based on a real one. (Lessons in Chemistry, q.v.)
-- 
Paul W