The Dogs of Babel by CAROLYN PARKHURST

Author:CAROLYN PARKHURST [PARKHURST, CAROLYN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Detective
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2806-2
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2003-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

For the keyboard, I decide to go see an acquaintance of mine, a man named Mike Wolfe who works in the electrical engineering department at the university. Mike has an interest in linguistics, so I think he might be willing to help me out. A former student of mine once asked Mike to help him write a program that would put together random sounds to create nonsense words for a project the student was doing on language formation. It was a rather meaningless project—in fact, as I recall, the student left the department soon afterward without receiving his degree—but I was impressed with what Mike came up with.

So I go to see Mike, and I tell him what I’m looking for. I don’t tell him it’s for a dog; I tell him I’m working with severely disabled children. I emphasize that several of them will need to hit the buttons with their noses. He nods respectfully and seems to believe me, but when I return to pick up the machine two weeks later, I see a cartoon, clearly cut from the campus newspaper, posted to the office door of one of Mike’s colleagues in the department. It shows a dog sitting in front of a computer, tongue hanging out, with a goofy look on its face. Its paws are resting on the keyboard, and a string of nonsense words are visible on the screen. Behind the dog stands a man, looking nothing like me, I must say, peering over the dog’s shoulder. “Brilliant!” the man is saying. “Don’t stop now!” The cartoon’s caption reads, “Arguments Against Tenure.”

But the machine is everything I could have hoped for. Mike has modified an old laptop—it will be a bit slow, he tells me, but it should meet my needs. The keys are large and marked clearly with the symbols I gave him. Since he was working with a standard keyboard, the keys when pressed each type a single letter. I’ll simply need to make a note of which letters result from which symbols, and I can translate what Lorelei meant to type. BNL, for example, translates to “Lexy tree fall.” And so on.

I spend two weeks working with Lorelei on memorizing the visual symbols before introducing the keyboard to her. First, I show her a flash card with a particular symbol on it—the symbol for tree, say—and I repeat the word several times. Next, I shuffle the card together with two other cards, making a big show out of it, like the magician I’m trying so hard to be, and I lay the three cards faceup on the floor.

“Water, Lorelei,” I say. “Where’s the water? Go find the water.”

At first, she doesn’t seem to understand what I want from her. The first time I give this order, she goes uncertainly to the corner of the room and picks up her toy giraffe in her teeth. Great, I think—now I’m making her question the meanings of words she already knows. So I begin to demonstrate what I want her to do.

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