Re: 7 Words That Dogs Can Understand (And 4 That No Dog Can)

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