The Dogs of Babel

TWO

Perhaps you’re familiar with some of the more celebrated cases of language acquisition in dogs, but allow me to provide a brief history to refresh your memory. First off, of course, is the case of the sixteenth-century child-dog of Lyons. This dog, by most accounts a keeshond brought into the area by Dutch traders, was adopted at birth by a grieving mother whose baby had died soon after childbirth. The woman suckled the dog like a child and dressed him in little nighties and bonnets. As the pup grew, his “mother” took great pains to teach him to speak and succeeded to some degree by sheer perseverance, though listeners often had to ask the woman to translate. The dog became a celebrated member of the community but never learned to frolic and play like other dogs. The dog and his mother lived happily together for thirteen years, until the woman grew ill, and when she lay on her deathbed, the dog never left her side. On the night the woman closed her eyes for the last time, the dog spoke his last words: “Without your ear, I have no tongue.” (I need hardly point out the double meaning of both the English “tongue” and the French langue, which refer both to the physical tongue and to language.) Though the dog lived another year after his mother’s death, he never made another noise, either canine or human. After his death, the people of Lyons erected a statue in his honor, with his final words engraved on the base.

I think this story, so full of fairy-tale magic and sadness yet so well documented by the greatest scientific minds of their age, will be the perfect opener for my book, my earnest and scholarly work in which I try to explain to my baffled colleagues why, after twenty years of devoting my time to the study of linguistics, I have decided to turn my energies to teaching a dog to talk.

I’ll need to begin with case histories to prove that I at least cracked a book before going completely off the deep end. They’ll want me to remind them of the strange case of Vasil, the eighteenth-century Hungarian who, influenced by a philosopher named Geoffrey Longwell, who believed that dogs were the lost tribe of Israel, performed a series of experiments on a litter of vizsla puppies. Vasil took as his inspiration the biblical story of the Garden of Eden; though the Bible is unclear as to whether there were dogs in Eden, Vasil concluded that God would certainly not have omitted such a fine species of animal. Taking as evidence the serpent’s speech to Eve, Vasil postulated that all animals must have been blessed with the power of speech in the earthly paradise, a power they lost when Adam and Eve left Eden. He felt that if he could restore that power, which had been unfairly wrested from the animals, he would uncover the first language ever spoken.

To recapture this language, Vasil placed each puppy in a walled-off garden, each one separate from its brothers and sisters, and attempted to re-create the conditions of Eden. He provided them with plentiful food and water, and he massaged their throats daily to encourage speech. He met with varied success. One puppy never spoke at all, one made sounds that resembled a mumbled French (although later researchers found it to be an Alsatian creole), and one learned only the Hungarian word for roast beef. The remaining five puppies merely barked, although they all seemed to understand one another.

Vasil’s theories drew condemnation from the Church, especially his premise that God had acted unfairly in revoking dogs’ powers of speech, and he spent the last twenty years of his life in prison. The vizslas were instrumental in his arrest; the dogs escaped and ran through the streets, with the French-speaking one barking out naughty and insulting limericks and the Hungarian-speaking one calling for roast beef, until the amazed crowd followed them to Vasil’s house.

The real clincher, I think, will be the tragic case of Wendell Hollis, which, my colleagues will certainly recall, is the most prominent example of this kind of inquiry in the modern era. Over a period of several years, Hollis performed surgery on more than a hundred dogs, changing the shape of their palates to make them more conducive to the forming of words. Several of the dogs died as a result of the surgery, which Hollis performed in his New York apartment, and many of the others ran away. Hollis was arrested after the police received a complaint about the noise; after years of putting up with the mangled barking, a neighbor called the police when one of the dogs learned to cry for help. This one dog, with a scarred throat and misshapen mouth, testified at the trial. Though he didn’t speak in complete sentences, he was able to say “hate” and “fire pain” and “brothers gone away.” The jury took only one hour to reach a verdict, and Hollis was sentenced to five years in prison.

None of these cases can be considered completely successful, of course. But it’s the very form these failures took, the “almost” quality of each half success, that makes me think there’s more in this area to be explored.

In fact, I find lately that I can think of nothing else.

But if I am to keep my good name in the academic community, something I’m no longer sure I care about doing, I can’t allow such subjectivity. I have to begin by telling my colleagues that there’s a whole body of work out there already, nearly as old as the study of language itself. I have to tell them that I’m not doing anything new at all.

If I could, though, I would begin the way poets used to do when they told their stories of love and war and troubles rained down from the heavens. I would begin like this:

I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with a skin like velvet pushed the wrong way. I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who wanted to know things no human being could tell him. This is the true beginning.

Let me return for a moment to my preliminary comments regarding the project I am about to undertake. As I have mentioned, I have a dog named Lorelei, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. She was my wife’s dog before she was mine. It is my proposal to work with Lorelei on a series of exercises and experiments designed to help her acquire language in whatever ways are possible, given her physiological and mental capacities. It is my proposal to teach Lorelei to talk.

I realize how this must sound. A year ago I would have been as skeptical as the rest of you. But you have to understand how the events of the past few months have changed my way of thinking. Let me remind you that we, as scientists, have witnessed in the past century the strange spectacle of apes speaking entire sentences with their hands. We’ve seen parrots who have learned to provide the punch lines of dirty jokes, much to the delight of their owners’ friends. We’ve seen guide dogs trained to turn on light switches and to listen for the crying of babies born to deaf parents. I myself have seen, on an amateur video show, a dog who has learned to make the sound “I love you.”

I’m not suggesting that any of the above examples offer conclusive proof I’ll succeed. I’m aware, for a start, that dogs have considerably less cranial capacity than gorillas and other higher primates, and I’m not kidding myself that dogs who say “I love you” and parrots who curse like sailors are doing anything other than performing tricks they know will result in praise and bits of food.

But in the evenings when I sit with Lorelei and she gazes up at me with her wide, inscrutable eyes, I wonder what she would tell me if she could. Sometimes I get down on the carpet with her to speak to her softly and ask her my questions while I rest my hand upon her great furrowed head. More than once I have awakened to find that I have fallen asleep with my head on the wide, rough expanse of her side.

The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together. I feel I have no choice but to give it a try.