Dogs seem to agree with humans that 'bouba' is round and 'kiki' is spiky

My intuition tells me that human evolution grokked language. Maybe like GPT it very quickly went from being complete gibberish to freakishly coherent. A handful of words and grammar rules leads to remarkable complexity. But that's a guess.

It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.

But all of that doesn't mean that someone who has never heard English wouldn't be able two tell which of "woof" and "miaw" is supposed to be the cat

I am not arguing this is the case, but the original poster obviously feels it is, connecting it to the top level post's idea of common ideas for what words describe over languages.

There's also another comment mentioning how it works for consonants, which I believe helps explain how it might work for dogs.

- The dog attacking is different from the owner causing the dog to attack. The latter is a higher bar to clear, and one people are going to want more evidence for. It's also incongruous when paired with the word "assault" with some other parts of your post. In particular, "let their dogs run off-leash" doesn't evoke the same mental image as "unleash their dog and tell them to attack." Your comment has the former and has language indicating the latter. People pick up on that sort of thing. For that matter, when trying to defend you to that one commenter I had to make a guess as to which interpretation of what you wrote is the most likely way to resolve that verbal inconsistency, and I might not have gotten it right. Maybe you really do get intentionally attacked by people unleashing their dogs on you. If so, why write about free-range dogs roaming around as it pertains to the attack problem?

- Active assault is also different from self-defense and from dogs accidentally picking up non-verbal cues.

And I focused on the "dogs attacking" part of your comment in that defense, but in the context of the article, your initial point was that dogs are sensitive to nonverbal clues, your evidence was that you've been attacked, yet the experiment had what I think is stronger evidence in that they explicitly controlled for that effect. Attacks happen for many reasons, potentially including nonverbal clues. Do they happen exclusively because of a sufficiently extreme sensitivity to nonverbal clues that the experiment's control wouldn't apply? Probably not? I imagine a lot of the people who gave you flack for the way you wrote about those attacks took that into account. The structure was "<A> evidenced by <B>" when that evidentiary link is tenuous and <B> is a bold statement about something that's clearly distressed you. That comes across more as an uncontrolled rant and makes people less likely to believe <B> in its entirety, whether true or not, and whether that intellectual habit of the readers is justified or not.

Independent of any linguistic nitpicking, I'm sorry you keep getting attacked. Stay safe out there.

> Where I've failed to do so I manage him to keep him away from those critters and people who would rather avoid him.

How does that happen? Squirel comes to you in park and asks "please break my backbone"? And you can not control your dog? Or perhaps you just do not carre at all?

> And I think even when people don't do all that, it's more lazy selfishness than it is hate.

No, it is a hate. Dog owners enjoy inflicting violence on other animals. They go out of they way to enable this behaviour!

Some dog owners (to be clear, some, not by any means all, but it only takes some to affect other people's general perceptions) seem to think they are objectively correct and the people who do not want that are wrong. So it is not hard for me to imagine someone who finds themselves regularly having unpleasant interactions with dogs feeling like "dog owners should stop that from happening", rather than (as is sometimes the case) acting like there's something wrong with people who think it's a problem. Conversely, it is understandable how people who are close to and friendly with an animal all day will sometimes fail to have sufficient perspective-taking to realize that not everyone feels as they do.

I've personally never had the extremely unpleasant experience of having a large dog try to jump at me. I have on rare occasions had the experience of having a small dog run at my legs, and the owner not immediately treat that as a failure on their part, which was unpleasant. Fortunately, most of those have then had the "I'm so sorry" reaction, rather than reacting with indignance, but I've definitely encountered pet owners who projected indignance that you don't think their animal is a precious sweetums who can do no wrong.

Most pet owners are extremely reasonable people, and it's unfortunate that encounters with the exceptions to that can give people a poor impression.

I understand people get scared, and do not control their emotion. But dog owner should still control their dog! Releasing dog after owner triggers it, is just pure hate!

It is like inviting delivery driver to your house, and latter claiming it was trespass!

Yeah this I know, by "bouba" being opposite I meant the waveform.

Really the phonetic terms here are not actually relevant and have betrayed me. It's more that the 'k' sound is "more [ex]plosive" in that it seems to build up more pressure and turbulence (probably as you say, because the consonant is in the rear, so pressure builds and bounces around in the mouth more, whereas the "b" just mostly blasts out the front more quickly). And the "k" surely has a more peaky / spikey waveform in the audible range.