Linguists’ Pets
Κατ Ο’Ικίδιο &
A. Mānsuētum
Language is arguably the most defining feature of human cognition, yet animal companions often communicate without words—through the pragmatics of presence or the prosody of purrs. For linguists and philologists, whose lives are steeped in parsing meaning and structure, pets offer a welcome reprieve from transformational rules and semantic drift. Below are some of the most celebrated animal companions of the linguistic glitterati.
- W.V. Quine had a pet gavagai. We think that’s a rabbit, but we can never be sure.
- Carl Gustav Hempel had a non-black non-raven.
- Sir William Jones had a *gʷṓws.
- We thought Ferdinand had a dog but now we’re not Saussure.
- Nikolai Marr had a ber.
- Berlin and Kay had a lot of pets. They started out with just a black cat and a white rabbit, but later they got a scarlet macaw, a canary, a green iguana...
- Steven Pinker had a genetically optimized poodle. It barked in Universal Grammar, but only when provoked by bad evolutionary metaphors.
- Noam Chomsky had a bear once, but got rid of it. Then it was an ex-bear.
- John Ridley Stroop had a goldfish named Violet.
- Roman Jakobson had an owl that hooted referentially at dusk, emotively at dawn, and phatically all night.
- J.R.R. Tolkien had a walrus, whose pedigree he had thoroughly researched.
- Rasmus Rask had a dog that barked differently in Iceland, Denmark, and Persia. He noticed.
- Jacques Derrida had a deconstructed donkey.
- Deborah Tannen’s cat refused to meow, framing its silence as a conversational strategy.
- Chomsky and Halle had a pet which was [+mammal] [–dog] [+miaow] [+like milk]. Their /kitten/ → [cat] / over time.
- Charles Hockett had a pet crow that exhibited all design features of language—except for displacement. It never planned ahead.
- Gottlieb Frege presupposed he had a unicorn that he asserted was bald.
- Benjamin Lee Whorf had a fish that only swam in water labeled “non-flammable.” He said it was safer that way.
- Bertrand Russell had a parakeet that liked to preen the feathers of other parakeets, but only those which did not preen their own feathers.
- Kenneth Pike’s pet chameleon was named Tag. It looked different in every environment, but always insisted, “I’m still me.”
- August Schleicher once kept a sheep he insisted on naming in Proto-Indo-European. Unfortunately, by the time he finished reconstructing the nominative singular, the sheep had wandered off.
- Ferdinand de Saussure had a cow and a barn owl. C’était vachement chouette!
- Louis Hjelmslev adopted a ferret named Form and Substance. It split into smaller ferrets any time it got excited.
- Eugene Nida had a dear little seal.
- Michael Halliday’s pet was a multifunctional platypus. It insisted every behavior had three metafunctions, including napping.
- Nelson Goodman used to have a grue lorikeet and a bleen jay. Now they’re the other way around.
- Pāṇini had a pet parrot that only spoke in perfectly ordered rules.
- Helmut had a Tyrrhenosaurus Rix.
- Edward Sapir’s canary sang differently depending on who was listening. He insisted it was cultural.
- Ludwig Zamenhof had lots and lots of pets—but they kept quarreling with each other. The cats fought the dogs and the dogs fought back; the snakes ate the hamsters and the tiger ate the sheep—yes, he really did have a pet tiger and a pet sheep! So, in order to create peace forever between the many forms of domesticated fauna in his home, he created a perfect pet by combining all the best bits of the pets he’d had before. It was a great idea, but unfortunately, tigers carried on eating sheep and snakes carried on eating hamsters.
- Jean Berko had a wug. Now she has two wugs.
- George Lakoff kept wasps for their awesome flying and dangerous stings.
- Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm kept a talking cat that told fairy tales, but only in Proto-Germanic. No one else could understand it, and they liked it that way.
- William Safire had a menagerie of pet peeves.
- Daniel Everett didn’t have any pets, but he did have a garden Noam.
- John Searle had a goldfish named Syntax. It lived in a tank labeled “This is not understanding.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein had a lion. It could speak, but he couldn’t understand it.
- Leonard Bloomfield didn’t have any pets. He was much fonder of flowers. Especially those in bloom. In a field.
- Franz Bopp owned a hamster with cousins in every Indo-European country. He spent years charting its genealogy.
- A bunch of Young Grammarians in 19th century Europe had lots of pets who kinda looked sorta similar—but also sorta different. Many had four legs and two ears like cats and rabbits, and others had wings and beaks like canaries and budgerigars. So, the Young Grammarians listened to the different sounds that the various animals made—and that’s how dinosaurs were discovered!
