Re: Mangani language

>     I have a copy of the November 1965 issue of
> Tarzan of the Apes comics
> (no. 154) which features what it calls a "complete
> Ape-English dictionary".
> It's one page of ape words with English definitions.
>  I estimate there's
> about 250 words there.  I checked against your
> dictionary through the letter
> G and everything in the comic is in yours, but yours
> has some words not in
> the comic.
Yes, I've added some words as I've deduced their
meaning. The previous dictionaries are frequently just
lists of words that Burroughs translated, though
sometimes words from the Pal-Ul-Don region are mixed
in (Pal-Ul-Don residents are not mangani but another
sort of primate).

I have been able to figure out the translations of
some words.  For instance busso = fly.  So = eat.  So
I translated bus as feces, because that's probably
what the mangani would notice the flies eating.

I also try to work out Burroughs' human prejudices.
I'm am working on mangani within the parascholarly
field of literary archeology in which fictional
characters are presumed to be based upon living people
(it's also called "The Game", and originates in
Sherlockians' attempt to reconcile the details in the
Holmes stories).  So from this point of view,
Burroughs is presumed to have worked from notes given
to him by Tarzan (there's more to it than that, but
it's not pertinent here). As a consequence, his biases
would have come through in his writing.

For instance, in the published texts, human beings are
grouped as "gomangani" (black-great-apes) or
tarmangani (white-great-apes); only people of African
descent (Africans and African Americans) are
gomangani, everyone else--Asians, Arabs, Europeans,
Mexicans--is tarmangani.  This sort of racial
categorization fits with Burroughs views of racial
heirarchy.

But the mangani primarily seem concerned with
hairiness (Burroughs used hairiness as a trope that
has some parallels with tropes used to signify
divinity in Homer, but I don't have access to my
dissertation to check the reference at the moment), so
it seems more likely that they would designate all
humans as hairless rather than be concerned with
skin-color based distinctions.  Consequently, I
devised the term "zan-mangani" (or skin-great-ape, or
hairless-great-ape) to signify human beings.


Pete Coogan


		
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