He’s a guide dog, so obviously very smart in some ways, but in other ways he’s very much still a dog. He’s still terrified of thunder and fireworks. While he’s normally aloof with occasional fits of cuddliness, when it’s loud outside he tries to climb into my skin.
I wish I could tell him “You’re fine, dude. The thunder is outside and you’re inside” in a way he understands.
But if you’ll permit me a linguistic tangent, you could take the concept of “talking dog” in a bunch of different directions.
-
Give him phonetically articulate human speech, but leave his mental faculties otherwise unchanged. He’d express his simple animal needs in a way that happens to correspond to words in a human language, and I would likewise be able to articulate simple concepts to him in a way he understands. Honestly not that far off from the array of push buttons thingy that we saw on YouTube a few years ago.
-
Make him fully sapient, but leave his vocal tract untouched, incapable of articulating human speech, but with the mental faculties to link symbols to meanings and form recursive ideas. A bunch of my constructed languages use this as a premise, talking dogs (or doglike aliens) that still sound like dogs.
If someone is unfamiliar with Japanese and Mandarin, they’re not going to be able to readily distinguish the two in writing. They don’t know, for example, that Japanese intersperses the Kanji with Kana, while Mandarin uses the hanzi logograms exclusively. But Chinese characters are very distinct from Latin or other Western writing systems, so if they see a sample containing Hanzi/Kanji, they’ll jump to whatever they’re familiar with.
I imagine a Chinese person with little to no exposure to Western writing would easily mistake French and English because they share so many words, even though they’re not closely related (Romance vs Germanic).