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Humorous or not, there was a video of a dog trainer that trained his (you guess it: German Shepherd) in German commands, partly so that when he worked with client's dogs, he could use English, and his German-speaking dog who would be in close proximity (useful for reactive training) wouldn't compete with the client's dog.


Reginald Foster, a great Latin expert whom I once got to study with, emphasized that Latin isn't inherently difficult as a spoken language, as evidenced by the fact that it used to be lots of people's native language and used for all kinds of ordinary daily purposes.

One of his slogans for this was "in Roma antiqua, etiam canes Latine locuti sunt" ('in ancient Rome, even the dogs spoke Latin').


Nice video of a contemporary latin-speaking community: https://youtu.be/sfWMgWnSQUw


I had heard about that lecture, but I hadn't seen the video before. The Latin is quite easy for me to follow, but I'm still impressed by Luke Ranieri's fluency (really on par with some of the most skilled Latin speakers I've met, well beyond my level even when I was regularly participating in spoken Latin events).

Hopefully I'll get to meet him and speak Latin with him some day.


"latine" with an e on the end is ablative, first declension?


This ‑e is an adverb ending. The belonging adjective is «latinus» ‹Latin›.


that makes more sense to me, because i asked thinking it was a typo on ablative with implicit lingua


Yes, one way of referring to Latin is "lingua Latina" or just "Latina", but there's an old custom of using adverbs to refer to use of languages. So Latine is "in Latin" or "Latinly" (and there are similar adverbs available for other languages).

Interestingly, the language adverbs are also used in a construction with scire (to know) or intellegere: "Latine scit" (he or she knows Latin), "Graece intellegit" (he or she understands Greek). In English we would definitely think of this as needing a direct object, but Latin allows it as an adverb, to understand "in a Greek way" (perhaps it would make sense to think of it as something like "in a Greek manner" or "from a Greek perspective").


yep totally understand, had four years of latin in the 80s, some Greek, and many more. it's interesting to see how an idea gets phrased slightly differently across even related languages, i have to admit.


So we're doing the opposite. As we're in the German spesking part of europe, our dog listens to English to not interfere with daily talk. It's IMHO one of the best choices to take a foreign language for your dog. You can also use different languages for different setups (e.g. to differentiate fun, working). Dogs anyway don't speak the language, they just listen to the voice, but as an owner it's easier to set context by moving to a different language.


The evil of global mutable state strikes again.

This is why I only train my dogs in a pure functional language.


Just don't be confused if they then follow the commands side-effect free.


"Reduce!" ("Reduzier!")

"Map!" ("Bild ab!")


It's merely the software architectural mistake of only constructing a broadcast channel.

Security by obscurity is fundamentally weak, this use wastes bandwidth, and can be destroyed by statistical analysis where the other dogs learn German.


I don't think you can entirely remove the side effect of getting treats.


Treats are without a doubt the only true universal language.


I think if I said sitz to my English-trained dog, she would sit.


Maybe your dog has been taking German classes while you’re at work…


Turns out if we say any word with the same inflection as sit, our dog sits!


I think it's partly because "sit" is one of the first commands they learn so if they're not sure what to do, they'll default to sit as that often gets the treat.

That's also why you teach "sit" first before, "bite the face of the person in front of me" (talking German Shepherds again)


We do it with our herding dogs so you can give the different dogs different commands.


Now I’m dying to know what kind of herding you do that requires this separation of powers


Just sheeps and it's a small herd we have for fun next to our vineyards. One dog could probably handle thm alone but it's more fun with two ;)


I think this is a great idea in general - security through obfuscation, kinda.


> German-speaking dog

Impressive!




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