Class 7 English Chapter 4: Animals, Birds, and Dr. Dolittle

A patient with a suggestion

The story opens in a kitchen, not a surgery. Doctor Dolittle is talking to the Cat’s-food-Man, who has come about a stomach-ache and leaves having changed the Doctor’s career. His advice is simple: give up treating people and treat animals instead.

His reason, and his evidence

The reason is that the Doctor knows more about animals than the vets nearby. The evidence is a book the Doctor wrote about cats, which the Cat’s-food-Man cannot read, because he cannot read at all. His wife Theodosia, who is a scholar, read it to him.

Who is listening

At the window there is a parrot called Polynesia. She is looking out at the weather and singing to herself, and then she stops. The detail is worth noticing, because the story has quietly put an eavesdropper in the room before anybody knows the eavesdropper can argue.

The parrot takes up the case

Once the man has gone she flies to the table and makes the argument properly. There are plenty of animal doctors, the Doctor objects. Her answer is that none of them are any good. That is a claim about quality rather than numbers, and the rest of the story is spent testing it.

The thing nobody had mentioned

Then she says it: animals can talk. The Doctor replies that he knew parrots could. He has missed the size of the claim, and she corrects him. Parrots speak two languages, people’s and bird’s.

Is the porridge hot yet

Her demonstration is the best joke in the chapter. Everyone knows a parrot asking for a cracker. Then she produces a line of bird language and asks him what it means. It means a question about porridge. The ordinary and the extraordinary arrive in the same breath.

What he does next

A book and a pencil. He rushes to the drawer, comes back, and asks her not to go too fast. He wants the Birds' A.B.C. first, and slowly. This is the moment the story tells us what kind of man he is: he treats a talking parrot as evidence to be written down.

An afternoon of rain

So they spend the afternoon at it. She perches by his notebook and supplies the words; he writes them down. Nothing dramatic happens. The story is content to let his expertise be built out of a long, wet afternoon of note-taking.

Enter Jip

At teatime the dog comes in and Polynesia says he is talking. The Doctor, looking at him, sees a dog scratching his ear. He has learned the words and still cannot read the patient in front of him.

The second lesson

This is the bigger one. Mouths are not the only instrument. An ear, a foot, a tail, the whole animal is available, and sometimes silence is preferred to any of them. A language, it turns out, is not only a vocabulary.

A question asked with a nose

Jip twitches up one side of his nose. It means: can you not see that it has stopped raining? Polynesia then turns the moment into a rule rather than an anecdote. A question, from a dog, is very often put with the nose.

The news gets out

The Cat’s-food-Man tells everybody, and the patients arrive. Old ladies bring pugs and poodles that have eaten too much cake. Farmers travel miles with sick cows and sheep. The practice is built on word of mouth, and the first mouth belonged to a man with a stomach-ache.

The plough horse

Then comes the case the chapter turns on. A plough horse has been treated for six weeks by the vet over the hill, who kept giving him big pills. The horse tried to explain and could not, because the vet understood no horse language. He is going blind in one eye. What he needs is spectacles.

Green ones

He would like a pair like the Doctor’s, only green, to keep the sun out of his eyes while he is ploughing. The Doctor agrees without argument. It is a small exchange and it contains the whole method: the patient is asked, the patient answers, and the answer is acted on.

The serious line

On his way out the horse says the thing the story is really about. People suppose that anyone can treat an animal, and they suppose it for one reason only: the animal will not complain. In fact, he says, the work takes a cleverer man than treating people does. In a comic story, that is a real argument.

Doors, and a tunnel

Afterwards the detail does the work. So many animals come that he needs separate doors: HORSES on the front, COWS at the side, SHEEP on the kitchen door. The mice get a tiny tunnel into the cellar, where they wait in rows. He never says he treats them as individuals. He builds doors.

Famous among animals

Word travels by the only post available. Birds flying abroad for the winter tell the animals in other countries, and in a few years every living thing for miles knows about John Dolittle, M.D. He is famous among animals all over the world, and the story ends by saying simply that he was happy.

Scenario:

A baby of eight months is brought to a clinic. She has cried for two days and will not feed. She cannot say where it hurts, point to it, or answer a single question. The doctor on duty examines her ears, her throat and her stomach, finds nothing, and prescribes something for a possible stomach upset. Two days later a second doctor notices that the baby turns her head away whenever anything comes near her left side, and finds an infection in that ear. The first doctor had looked at both ears and seen nothing unusual in either.

Analysis:

This is the plough horse’s argument in a modern clinic, and it is worth noticing that the first doctor did nothing careless. He examined the obvious places and treated the most likely cause, which is ordinary good practice when a patient can describe nothing. The second doctor succeeded by reading behaviour instead of waiting for speech, which is exactly Polynesia’s second lesson: a patient who cannot talk is still communicating, with a turned head rather than a twitched nose. The horse’s claim stands up here. People assume that a patient who does not complain is an easier patient, and the truth is the reverse, because a complaint is the single most useful piece of evidence a doctor ever gets. Remove it and the work becomes harder, not simpler. Note also what the story does not claim. Nobody in it has a magical gift. The Doctor spends a rainy afternoon writing words down, and the second doctor in the clinic simply watched for longer.

Activity:

Watch an animal, or a baby, for ten minutes without interacting. Write down five movements and what you think each one means. Then ask somebody who knows them well, and mark which of your five you had right.

Title:

Read a question written without words

Safety:

None needed, beyond keeping gestures gentle and giving each other room.

What You Notice:

Questions about here and now get across easily. Questions about when, or about something not present, almost never do. That is a real limit of body language and it is why Polynesia had to teach the Doctor words as well as gestures — and why the plough horse, who needed to explain a six-week history, could not manage with a nose.

Hugh Lofting invented Doctor Dolittle in letters home to his children from the trenches of the First World War, because he could not find anything cheerful to tell them about the war itself.

Horses really can be short-sighted or long-sighted, and a vet today will test a horse’s vision. Spectacles are not used, but the story’s joke rests on a real condition.

The letters M.D. after a name stand for Doctor of Medicine. The story keeps them after John Dolittle’s name even once all his patients have four legs or wings.

The order of events — Patient, Parrot, Pencil, Plough horse, Puddleby — The patient suggests it, the Parrot argues it, the Pencil writes the words down, the Plough horse proves it works, and Puddleby fills with animals in glasses.

How animals talk, according to Polynesia — Ears, feet, tails — and the nose asks — Not only mouths. And dogs nearly always use their noses for questions, which is why a twitched nose is Jip asking whether the rain has stopped.

Where new words come from

English rarely invents a word out of nothing. Far more often it takes two words it already has and pushes them together. The extract is full of the results: a flowerpot, a windowsill, a plough horse, the Cat’s-food-Man.

What makes it one word

Not the spacing. A compound is two words joined so that the pair means something neither of them meant alone. Bird language is a compound even with a space in the middle, because the two words together name one particular thing.

The test worth remembering

Ask whether you could work the meaning out from the parts. A blackboard is not simply any board that happens to be black, and a greenhouse is not a house that is green. When the pair has gone somewhere the two words could not reach on their own, you have a compound.

Three spellings

The book gives the three kinds, and the extract supplies an example of each. Cat’s-food-Man is hyphenated, with dashes. Bird language is open, with a space. Flowerpots is closed, with nothing at all between the two halves.

And no rule to predict them

This is the part to accept rather than learn. Nothing tells you which spelling a compound will take. Teatime closed up; ice cream did not. Check-in kept its hyphen; checkout lost one. There is no principle underneath, only convention, and a dictionary is the only authority.

Why that should sound familiar

It is the same kind of fact as collocation. Which words will keep company, and how a compound will be spelt, are both matters of usage rather than structure. Reading is how you acquire them, and no amount of reasoning will supply them.

Hyphens tend to be young

There is one soft pattern. A hyphen often marks a compound that is still new to the language, and English likes to close them up as they settle. To-day and to-morrow were written with hyphens within living memory. A hyphen is therefore a rough guess at a word’s age.

Saying it aloud

Here is a test your mouth already knows. English stresses the first part of a compound and the second word of an ordinary adjective and noun. Try it: GREENhouse against green HOUSE. The first is a glass building for plants, the second is a house somebody painted.

Why the stress test is useful

Because it works on pairs you have never met. A blackBIRD and a black BIRD are different creatures, and so are a DARKroom and a dark ROOM. You can apply it without knowing anything about either word, which is more than can be said for the spelling.

Building your own

Once you can recognise them, making them is easy. Take fun and loving and you get fun-loving. Take never and ending and you get never-ending. Take tree and tops and you get treetops, closed up, because that one has been around long enough.

A warning about the new ones

With a compound you have built yourself, check it exists before using it in writing. English allows you to coin one, and a reader will usually understand it, but an invented compound in the middle of an exam answer looks like a spelling mistake rather than a coinage.

Words hidden across the join

There is a game in the chapter worth noticing for what it teaches. Animal names can be hidden inside sentences, lying across the boundary between two words, so that no single word contains them. Finding them means ignoring the spaces and reading the letters as one stream.

Which brings us to palindromes

A palindrome is anything whose letters run the same way in either direction - a word, a phrase, a whole sentence. The extract hands you one without drawing attention to it: in the line about the vet who never looked at the horse’s eyes, the word eye is identical read from the back.

Easy at word length

Plenty of words qualify. Level, rotator, radar, noon, civic. They are easy because you only have to satisfy one short sequence of letters, and words of odd length get a free middle letter that has to match nothing.

Harder at sentence length

A famous one asks whether the speaker saw a car or a cat. Here the spaces and the punctuation are ignored altogether and only the letters count. That changes the problem completely, because every letter you add near the beginning demands a matching letter near the end.

Why long ones are so rare

The constraint tightens as you go. Halfway through a sentence you are no longer choosing words freely; you are choosing words whose letters happen to mirror what you have already written. That is why the famous palindromes are famous, and why most people’s first attempt is three words long.

Scenario:

A shop near a school sells plants. The owner writes a sign saying GREEN HOUSE PLANTS, 40 RUPEES, meaning the small plants that grow in a greenhouse. On the first morning three customers ask the price of the green-painted house behind the shop, and one asks whether she can buy a plant that is green rather than flowering. By the afternoon the owner has written a second sign. It says GREENHOUSE PLANTS, with no space, and nobody asks either question again.

Analysis:

One space caused the whole problem, and it did so by changing which words belonged together. GREEN HOUSE PLANTS can be read as green plus house-plants, or as greenhouse plus plants, and both readings are grammatical. Closing the space forces the second, because greenhouse is then a single word and can only attach to plants as a unit. Notice that saying the sign aloud would have settled it instantly: GREENhouse plants, with the stress on the first part, is unambiguous, while green HOUSE plants is a different phrase entirely. This is the stress test doing real work. It also shows why the three spellings matter in practice even though no rule predicts them. The spelling of a compound is conventional, but it is not decorative: in writing, the space or its absence is the only signal a reader has about which words form a unit, and the voice that would have disambiguated it is not available on a sign.

Activity:

Find three signs or labels where a space is doing real work, or where its absence is. Write out both possible readings of each, then decide which the writer intended and whether the spelling helped.

Title:

Build a palindrome, and find out why it stops

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Nearly everybody manages three words and stalls at five, and the stall arrives suddenly rather than gradually. The reason is that each letter near the beginning fixes a letter near the end, so your freedom halves as you go. The famous palindromes are famous because the constraint beats almost everyone.

Today and tomorrow were written to-day and to-morrow well into the twentieth century. The hyphens dropped out as the words became too familiar to need them.

The longest single-word palindrome in common use in English is racecar or the word level’s longer cousins; longer ones such as detartrated exist mainly in chemistry.

German builds compounds without limit by simply closing them up, which is why a single German word can take a whole English phrase to translate.

The three kinds of compound — H-O-C — Hyphenated, Open, Closed — Hyphenated has a dash, Open has a space, Closed has neither. The extract gives one of each, and the order H-O-C is roughly the order a new compound travels in: hyphen first, closed last.

Is it really a compound? — New meaning, first-part stress — Two checks. Does the pair mean something the two words do not? And does your voice stress the first part when you say it? A GREENhouse passes both; a green HOUSE fails both.

A tense that looks past and acts present

Look at two sentences from the story. That man has got sense. Can you not see that it has stopped raining? Both describe something that happened earlier. Neither is a past tense. This is the present perfect, and the name is the clue: it is a present tense.

How it is built

Has or have, and then the past participle of the main verb. The auxiliary agrees with the subject, so he has and they have. The main verb takes the form you would use after have: walked, gone, written, taken, got.

The participle trap

With regular verbs the participle looks exactly like the simple past, which hides the difference. She walked and she has walked use the same word. The irregular verbs give the game away: she went, but she has gone. Never she has went.

The three uses, as the book gives them

First, an action just completed: it has stopped raining. Second, an action begun earlier and still relevant: he has got sense. Third, an action where the time does not matter and the deed does: she has written three books.

What all three share

Every one of them is making a claim about now. The rain stopped a minute ago and the point is that you may go out. He acquired sense at some time and the point is what he is like today. The books were written over years and the point is that they exist.

So treat it as a present tense

That single idea replaces the three rules. Ask what the sentence is telling you about the present moment, and the perfect will usually be right. Ask when something happened, and it will usually be wrong.

Why yesterday breaks it

Here is the error worth avoiding. I have seen him yesterday is not English. The perfect claims something about now; yesterday points at a closed period that has finished. The two pull in opposite directions and the sentence tears.

And what to use instead

A finished time takes the simple past: I saw him yesterday. Last week, in 2019, when I was six — all of them take the simple past. With no time stated, or with a period still running such as today or this week, the perfect is usually correct.

A test you can apply quickly

Try adding yesterday to the sentence. If it fits, you want the simple past. If it sounds wrong, you are in the territory of the perfect. Has she arrived takes no yesterday; did she arrive takes one happily.

The present continuous, by contrast

He is asking you a question. I am going blind in one eye. Both of these report something in progress, happening now or around now. The form is a part of be plus the -ing form of the verb.

Stopped, stopping, has stopped

Three sentences about the same rain. It stopped is a past report. It is stopping means the rain is still falling but easing. It has stopped means the rain is over and you may go out now. Only the last two are present tenses, and they disagree about whether you will get wet.

And the simple present

The story says there are plenty of animal doctors, not there are being plenty. The simple present is for things generally true, which need no moment attached to them. Horses pull ploughs is the same kind of sentence: a standing fact, with no particular morning in view.

Listening for details, not for gist

The chapter’s listening task is an announcement for the Doctor’s new clinic, and it is a different skill from following a story. You are not asked what it was about. You are asked for a street number, a town, the hours on a weekday, and which animals are welcome.

How to listen for a detail

Read the questions before the announcement starts, so you know what you are hunting for. Announcements are written to be heard once, which is why they put the day before the time and often repeat a number. A listener cannot rewind.

Talking to a patient

The speaking task puts you in the Doctor’s chair with a cue card. The first case is a cough and cold, and the suggested answer is ginger and honey, with warm fluids and rest. Short, concrete, and something the patient can actually do.

What the horse would say about it

Remember the plough horse. His complaint was that nobody asked him anything. So in your exchange, ask before you advise: where it hurts, how long it has been going on, what makes it worse. Notice that the second of those questions needs the present perfect.

Scenario:

A clinic prints a form for new patients. One line asks: when did your symptoms start? A nurse notices that about a third of the forms have that line left blank or answered with a guess. She tries a different wording for a week: how long have you had these symptoms? Almost every form comes back filled in, and several patients add detail nobody had asked for. The doctor is puzzled, because the two questions seem to want the same information.

Analysis:

They do not want the same information, and the difference is a tense. When did your symptoms start asks for a point in finished time, so it needs a date or an hour, and a patient who has felt gradually worse for a fortnight genuinely does not have one. The question is unanswerable for exactly the people most likely to be ill. How long have you had these symptoms is a present perfect, which asks about a situation that began earlier and is still going on. A patient can answer that with about two weeks, or since the rains started, neither of which is a point in time. So the second form collects more because it asks something people can know. There is a lesson here beyond the clinic. The tense you choose decides what kind of answer is possible, and a question in the wrong tense looks like a failure of memory on the patient’s part when it is really a failure of grammar on the form’s.

Activity:

Find three questions on a real form at home or at school. Write down the tense of each and what kind of answer it forces, then rewrite one in a different tense and say what changes about the answers you would get.

Title:

Ask before you advise

Safety:

This is a language exercise, not medical practice. Do not use it to advise anybody who is actually unwell.

What You Notice:

The duration question nearly always earns its place, because how long something has gone on separates a minor complaint from one worth worrying about. That is also why the real form in the case study worked better once it was put into the perfect, and why the plough horse was so annoyed that nobody asked him anything at all.

Have in the present perfect is not the have of possession. In she has finished nobody owns anything, which is why grammars call it an auxiliary or helping verb.

Many English past participles are irregular because they come from an older system that marked tense by changing the vowel inside the word: sing, sang, sung.

A screen reader, a Braille display and a clinic announcement all solve the same problem: putting information into a form somebody can actually receive.

What the present perfect is for — The perfect is about NOW — All three uses the book lists are claims about the present, with an earlier event given as the reason. Hold that and the three stop needing to be memorised separately.

Perfect or simple past? — A finished time wants the simple past — Yesterday, last week, in 2019 — any closed period takes the simple past. With no stated time, or a time still running such as today or this week, the perfect is usually right.