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LanguageNovember 19, 2010 Good dog trainers and dog-training books remind you often that dogs do not speak English -- or Gaelic, Spanish, Japanese, or Swedish, to name some of the languages spoken by subscribers to the Malamute e-list I'm on. "Sit" means nothing to a dog until you encourage him to position himself with his butt and forepaws on the floor and forelegs vertical, and then associate that behavior with the word "sit." You could just as easily associate it with "squat," "scream," or "fred" and your dog would (dog willing) sit when you said that word. Domestic dogs are all at least bilingual. They speak English -- and/or Gaelic, Spanish, Japanese, or Swedish -- and they speak Dog. If the dogs from Malamute-L traveled to an international dog convention, they'd have little trouble communicating. Because Malamute-L is an English-language list, all subscribers can at least get along in English even if it's not their first language. But if you recruited a dozen humans at random from around the world, the chances are good that they'd have a hard time getting a conversation going that involved all of them. Hell, it's hard enough for monolingual English-speakers if one is from Boston, one from Texas, one from Sydney, one from Yorkshire, and one from Mumbai. So. I'm going to Norway in less than three weeks. (Gulp.) I'm told that English is widely understood and spoken in Norway, especially in the cities. Indeed, I've worked with several Norwegian writers, all of whom were writing in English, and I'm going to work with two of them on the English-language translation of a book that's about to come out in Norwegian. Nevertheless, I think it's rude to go to Norway knowing not a word of Norwegian, and that is how much I knew when I got the invitation less than a month ago. So I went to the West Tisbury library and took out a basic (very basic) Norwegian-language course. Now I'm marveling even more than usual at the ability of dogs to live among humans who, in many cases, don't understand much (or any) Dog. Dogs read us amazingly well despite the language barrier and figure out what we want. They manage to distinguish what we say we want from what we really want from what we'll actually put up with. Human babies start figuring this out almost as soon as we're born, and by the time we start formal schooling most of us have it down cold. It's been a long, long time since I was that young, and I haven't tried to learn another language since I left college. Before I moved to Martha's Vineyard, I lived in D.C. neighborhoods where Spanish was widely spoken; having studied Spanish, and having grown up with a mother and grandmother who spoke Spanish with each other (but made no effort to teach it to us kids), I could often understand what was going on around me and even make simple requests, but that's a long way from trying to make my way where only Spanish is spoken. Listening to very simple Norwegian conversations and repeating the questions and answers after the speakers on the CDs . . . Wow. I feel like a two-year-old who's learning to say words she understands in a way that the adults can understand, except I'm pretty sure that when I was two years old I didn't feel like a complete idiot. Frustrated, sure, when I couldn't get my point across, but that self-conscious suspicion that you're making a fool of yourself comes later. Just making the right sounds is a challenge. When I started studying Arabic, I couldn't even hear the difference between certain consonants. In English, "soap" is soap no matter how you pronounce the s. In Arabic, "sin" and "sad" (I just tried to use the Arabic letters but this convinced the bloggery's word processor that it should start moving from right to left, so I gave up. Pretend there's a dot under the s in "sad" to indicate that it's velarized) are distinct "phonemes," which is to say that they're heard differently by Arabic-speakers. Conversely, English-speakers hear a distinct difference between "bat" and "pat," and that's a good thing because "bat the ball" and "pat the pall" mean rather different things. The p sound, however, doesn't exist in standard Arabic. Arabic-speakers hear b and p (which is an unvoiced b) as, at most, very slight variations in the pronunciation of the same letter. As an adult, in other words, I know how hard it can be to understand someone whose pronunciation is "off," and when that knowledge is combined with the deep-rooted fear of looking or sounding like an idiot, the result can be total paralysis. I am, however, persevering with my Norwegian-language CDs. I can now say, in Norwegian, "Excuse me, do you understand English?" and "I don't understand Norwegian." I cannot write these things in Norwegian because so far I've managed to heed the instructions not to look at the written version too soon. Being a written-word junkie, I grasp the importance of this advice. Good dog trainers and dog-training books often advise not assigning a word to a behavior -- for instance, "sit" to that behavior of plunking your butt on the ground while your forehand remains upright -- until the behavior looks the way you want it. I want to get the sounds right before I look at the letters. If my dog can learn a few words of English, I can learn a few words of Norwegian.
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