From Sarah Symmons
I was delighted to see your report that an orangutan named Rocky had been helped or trained to produce “word-like” utterances in a “conversational context” (6 August, p 14). This vindicates the view of 18th-century linguist Lord Monboddo that an orangutan “might be taught to speak”. The lexicographer Samuel Johnson later ridiculed this notion, as recorded in James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Johnson should have been more open-minded.
Colchester, Essex, UK
