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.