What follows is not a scientific paper, nor a confession, but a brief account of a major discovery whose implications remain only partly clear. I am authorised to release this first public note concerning the Doggerel Files. I cannot explain why dogs have kept this from us.
It is well understood that dogs can recognise words and phrases from the human languages spoken around them. That much belongs to received information, or what might be called common awareness.
Recently, however, rumours have circulated among those who work closely with dogs that a collection of certain historical files exist: stored on computers, backed up in the cloud, and apparently dictated by one or more unusually intelligent dogs, using their own language.
I do not know how many dogs had been involved in the immense project, nor the identity or breed of its facilitator, curator, or editor. The project had become a sleeping secret.
But the secret is no longer dormant. It is that one or several dogs somehow managed to make oral contributions to sound receptors, which recorded the sounds and stored them as files.
Somew time later, these files were assimilated and interpreted by a special AI software that could perfectly understand and decode the sounds that dogs make to each other and to humans.
In other words, AI has succeeded in translating the sounds made by dogs into human languages. Once decoded, those sounds amounted to a coherent language.
The process was tested exhaustively until the inaccuracies in translation had been ironed out, even to the extent of understanding most of the sounds of other canine species, such as wolves, foxes, coyotes, jackals, dholes and African wild dogs. Acting as the authorised intermediary, I have seen and heard some of this output.
It can also be established that this was a genuine discovery and not a confection. The files, and their translations, are safely stored, although I have limited access to its contents.
The essence of the discovery is that there is an ancient and coherent language which all dogs around the world share, and have always shared, from even before the time when dogs forged their special relationship with human beings.
No human has ever been able to translate the sounds of dogs into a human language, although plenty have assumed that dogs knew far more about themselves, and about other dogs and human beings, than was thought possible. Some sounds, of course, have always been obvious to many humans. Even these signs (of extreme contentment and discontent, anger, love, hunger, and so on) lacked precise nuance in translation.
The language is known to dogs as Doggerel, though the last two letters are inconsequentially different in certain parts of the world. A few canines still have accents so difficult that they have never understood other dogs, nor other dogs them. These cases are vanishingly rare, and are most often reported in relation to jackals.
The real surprise is that the AI programme had been able to look beyond conventional language roots and reach into the essential structures of communication between animals. It identified all the main constituents of a working language in which coherent communication is the defining characteristic.
AI describes Doggerel as complex and rule-based, but with no structural similarity to any human language ever recorded. English, with its huge number of words, was the first language used in the translation.
There have been human incursions into Doggerel, as might be expected from centuries of proximity and mutual dependence between dogs and humans. These remain confined to the margins of both human languages and Doggerel. Obvious contemporary transition points in English include words and phrases such as “sit”, “hello”, “come here”, “go away”, “roll over”, “shut up”, and the names by which dogs are called.
This works across all human languages. In a limited way, the transfer can sometimes be seen in reverse, although these cases seem to be dominated by communications of welcome, celebration, warning or impending violence. Even here, humans regularly misunderstand Doggerel words and phrases, often to their cost.
As to the Doggerel files themselves, I am bound by certain conventions, and, borrowing the language of financial services, I cannot release the crystallised material until it has been uncrystallised by the AI programme to which I am a unique subscriber. I have been permitted only to publish what I have written above, together with such uncrystallised excerpts as they are released in the future. I have no knowledge about the person or animal instructing the AI programme who behind the staged release of the files to me.
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Get Righting!
The Righter
Authorised Intermediary of the Doggerel Files