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Sir Richard Burton, eccentric 19th century explorer, scholar, and Hero of the Athanasius Kircher Society, spoke 29 languages and 12 dialects:

He was the first non-Muslim to make a successful pilgrimage to Mecca posing as one of the faithful, and the first to penetrate the ancient kingdom of Harar, in Somalia. He was the first Westerner to discover Lake Tanganyika, in an attempt to find the source of the Nile. He served as a spy in peacetime India and as an officer in the Crimean War. He prospected for gold in Egypt, West Africa, and Brazil. He wrote what is thought to be the best book on sword fighting of the nineteenth century. He introduced the word “safari” into the English language and is said to have introduced Turkish delight [a candy consisting of jellylike cubes] to Europe. He was one of the earliest translators of the Kama Sutra and of the Arabian Nights, and he also wrote poems in the manner of the classics of Arabic literature. … Explorer, anthropologist, linguist, erotologist, universal genius - [he] could easily have turned up as a character in a Joseph Conrad novel. - Joseph Epstein, New Yorker (11/23/98)

But it was Burton’s work in compiling a dictionary of monkey language that has earned the admiration of artist Walton Ford:

“His language studies continued unabated and his interest in the science of the spoken word led him to conduct an interesting experiment with some pet monkeys. Curious as to whether primates used some form of speech to communicate, he gathered together forty monkeys of various ages and species and installed them in his house in an attempt to compile a vocabulary of monkey language. He learned to imitate their sounds, repeating them over and over. And he believed they understood some of them. Each monkey had a name, Isabel, his wife, explained. He had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and one tiny one, very pretty, small and silky looking monkey he used to call his wife and put pearls in her ears. His great amusement was to keep a kind of refectory for them where they all sat down on chairs at mealtimes and the servants waited on them and each had its bowl and plate with the food and drink proper for them. He sat at the head of the table and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a baby’s high chair… He had a list of about sixty words before the experiment was concluded, but unfortunately the results were lost in a fire in 1860 in which almost all his early papers perished.”

Ford’s paintings of Burton’s monkeys, including “Dirty Dick Burton’s Aide de Camp” (below), are currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 8:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized, language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.