Richard Burton's Monkeys
The great explorer had a monkey school
During his time in India, explorer Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) collected 40 monkeys of different ages, species, and genders, and created an unusual "monkey school" where he attempted to learn their language.
Burton took this experiment quite seriously, giving each monkey an honorary title like "chaplain," "secretary," and "aide-de-camp."
He even had a special "wife" monkey - a small, silky monkey whom he adorned with pearls and seated in a high chair next to him during meals.
He would preside over dinner, with servants waiting on the monkeys. Most remarkably, Burton claimed to have identified up to 60 monkey "words" and recorded them in a vocabulary.
Unfortunately, after his death, his wife Isabel burned his journals and monkey vocabulary, leaving this eccentric linguistic experiment largely lost to history.
Considering his method of learning languages was, by his own admission, to get himself a mistress who spoke the language learn it from her in bed, I can only hope that his monkeys were spared. He did learn something like a dozen or so languages that way, however, including Arabic sufficient to enter Mecca disguised as an Arab, and sufficient Afghani dialects to pass among the hill tribes as a local. It was the record of his repeated and unrepented infidelities that apparently persuaded his wife to burn his papers after his death.
Let's be sure to remember the sage advice: " Never monkey with another monkey's monkey." :)