Working Out The Intricacies of Canine English Passive Vocabulary

Last night at bedtime, Ian was reflecting on the possible limitations of American pet dogs' comprehension of English vocabulary.  He proposed something along the lines of: "I think maybe they know "day," but they don't know "today."  I thought maybe he was proposing that dogs have a concept of a unit of time, but no notion of the meaning of the here-and-now (not very likely, now that I think of it; dogs certainly live in the present...), but it turned out that the nuances that he was teasing out had to do directly with the words themselves, even down to individual syllables.  He figured that "day" would be something that they would know, since the people in their lives use that term repeatedly in conversation, but he thought that maybe the "to" portion of "today" might throw them off, because it involves the word "to."

"To" turns out to be problematic, in Ian's canine philology, because of inevitable ambiguity bound up in the proliferation of competing monosyllabs:  "to," "two," and "too."  Ian believed that these three homonyms might cause a dog to miss out entirely on the meaning of the word "to," and of any word that incorporates that syllable into its own form, such as "today."

And I must admit, I think he's right:  I suspect that dogs might not understand the subtle distinctions in the meanings of the three "to/two/too" forms, and I even agree with him that they probably don't grasp the word "today," itself.

(November 9, 2013)