Naming the animals

People always seem to assume that when Adam named the animals he was creating a language, assigning common nouns to the various species -- saying, "You lot shall be called dogs; you lot, cane spiders; you over there, white-throated guenons," and so on.

Obviously he was doing nothing of the sort. If Adam had been tasked with inventing a language from scratch, nouns for animals would have been a relatively low priority. Why wasn't he coining words like leg, tree, breakfast, sun, or gully? Why did he name only animals -- and, later, his wife? Because he was giving them names -- personal names.

I've always followed Adam's example in this. Any animal that I see often enough to recognize sooner or later gets a name, and I've always had a knack for noticing the features that distinguish each individual animal from its conspecifics. There are limits, of course -- I never could tell one black-capped chickadee from another -- but I clearly remember that as a child I distinguished and named each of the dozen or so mourning doves that frequented our bird feeder. Individual ants of course did not receive names, but colonies did. Certain colonies enjoyed our favor and received occasional gifts -- the biggest of which was a roadkilled toad which the workers assiduously remodeled their whole hill to accommodate.

*

I've often been surprised at how readily animals of a variety of "higher" species seem to grasp the concept of a name -- something that seems pretty abstract for an animal to deal with. Dogs and cats, of course, but also, surprisingly, sugar gliders -- very small animals with no real history of domestication.

Each of our cats is known by several different monikers in two different languages, but each can recognize and respond to all of its names. The cat called Pinto, for example, answers to Pinto, P, Doudou, Heibai, and Xiaohuai. He also understands that Scipio is the name of another cat whom he particularly hates, and he responds to that name by lowering his ears and tensing up. I find this ability -- in a not-very-social species that communicates primarily by body language -- nothing short of astonishing. I've sometimes wondered if it might not have a psychic component -- if the cat responds not so much to the name itself as to the attention channeled by the act of uttering it.