Would you then go out a play a game of triangle toss?
You don’t sound like you have much experience with dogs. They do use language in a rudimentary way, sufficient to use the concept of a name. It’s not a difficult thing to do either, a sound is associated with a thing, which could be a person, another animal, or an object. Understanding that things can have a unique identifier is hardly a high level concept.
Yes- ours knows names of at least 4 other people, and will go/paw/woof at them on command.
ETA: She also seems to know locations, regardless of the tone of voice we speak them in. (Dog park, Cottage, River.)
True enough same with my dogs…
I might as well add my anecdote, which we discovered years ago at the park but without a ball to fetch: The Momma Poppa Game, where we toss him back and forth with “Go to Momma/Poppa.”
Most likely this is a matter of training (whether intentional or not). Melody is trained to respond when her owner says “Melody”. If you reward Miranda for looking up when you say “Melody”, she’d begin acting as though Melody was her name.
After this video shall we just close the discussion on this topic moderators
Here’s a sketchy idea for an experiment that might help to divide the question of whether dogs understand their names as just sounds that mean they should pay attention, or whether they understand the name as being their label.
[ul]
[li]Teach the dog to respond to its name (as normal)[/li][li]Additionally, demonstrate that you use its name in contexts like “one for me, one for Fido”[/li][li]Teach the dog to put toys on a blanket using commands “Put the ball on the blanket”, “Put the chicken on the blanket”, etc.[/li][li]Once the dog can perform that task reliably, try the instruction “Put Fido on the blanket”[/li][li]If the dog sits on the blanket in response to that instruction, it adds weight to the notion that the dog understands the term ‘Fido’ means itself.[/li][/ul]
I’m sure it’s tone. I used to play with my Dad’s dog by getting her to sit at one end of the garden and, by calling her name, get her to run over to me (she was a Rottweiler and she’d knock me down then lovingly start nuzzling me - I must have been starved of attention as a boy). I used to call “sit” and “Tessa” but if I swapped the words over and kept the tone identical she would still act as if the words had never been swapped. If I swapped the words AND the tone it wouldn’t work. She would only respond to the tone of my calls.
That might work. It presumes the dog understands the concept of ‘put’ though. The dog would have to be able to put any named object on the blanket, not something every dog can grasp, and in addition the concept that the dog is the same as the objects. There are simpler examples throughout the thread, dogs know how to respond to their own and know when another dog is supposed to respond. That pretty much determines it to me. A name is an identifier, there’s abundant evidence dogs know their own identifier and the identifiers of other dogs, people, and things. If you want to read any more into the concept you could easily be passing a dog’s level of comprehension. You knew your name when you were a very young baby, possibly less intelligent to a dog at that point. You learned the same way dogs do, through repetition of association with a sound. It just doesn’t mean much.
Some jokes are so good they’re worth repeating. 
I use the phrase “Blah blah Ginger” a lot to describe explaining something to someone hopeless. e.g. “I was talking to pointy-haired boss about the problems with the new TPS report format but it was all blah blah Ginger to him.”
I know cats will respond to tone, my mother could whistle a high note and one cat came and a higher note and the other one came. No one else would make either cat respond, but then again, that’s cats for you.
So have I.