Great Ape Language in Fiction
Fantasy writer Edgar Rice Burroughs invented a fictitious great ape language called Mangani in his Tarzan books. This imagined language included such words as Kreegah! ("Beware!") and Tarmangani ("Great White Ape"). These words and others are sometimes used by cartoonists, and for facetious slang. (See Kreegah bundolo).
Writer Michael Crichton used the concept of great ape language in his 1980 novel Congo, in which a fictional gorilla named Amy communicates extensively with her keeper using signs. This is also shown in the movie Congo.
The X-Files has an episode titled Fearful Symmetry in which a gorilla named Sophie communicates extensively with humans via signs.
The 1987 film Project X, starring Matthew Broderick, had a chimpanzee, named Virgil, use of signs as an important part of the plot.
In the 2011 film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, two apes used signs to communicate with humans and with each other. Although the apes' brains have been enhanced in the film, there is an orangutan named Maurice shown to use signs prior to any enhancement.
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Famous quotes containing the words ape, language and/or fiction:
“Said an ape as he swung by his tail
To his offspring both female and male,
“From your children, my dears,
In a couple of years
May evolve a professor at Yale.””
—Anonymous.
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—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
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