Mangani - As A Language

As A Language

The Mangani language is depicted as a primal universal language shared by a number of primate species in addition to the Mangani themselves, including monkeys (Jungle Tales of Tarzan and others), Indonesian orangutans (Tarzan and the Foreign Legion), and the more man-like Sagoths of Pellucidar (Tarzan at the Earth's Core). In the later Tarzan novels, Tarzan is actually shown conversing in Mangani with his monkey companion Nkima more often than with the Mangani themselves. Other jungle animals are depicted as being able to understand it to varying degrees.

The language as described by Burroughs is made up largely of grunts and growls representing nouns and various basic concepts. The bestial quality of the speech, however, does not come through in the rather large lexicon of Mangani words Burroughs actually provides. The depicted language can be thought of as bearing a relationship to the described language similar to that of the movies' euphonious "Tarzan yodel" to the books' terrifying "victory cry of the bull ape" from which it supposedly derives; the example in each instance falls short of embodying the description.

The word "mangani" is a compound, with man meaning "great" or "large" and gani meaning "ape" (or perhaps "people"). With modifications, the term is also applied to humans, gomangani ("dark-great-people") for black-skinned humans and tarmangani ("light-great-people") for white-skinned humans, suggesting that the Mangani regard human beings as variations on their own type. Notably, gorillas do not seem to be regarded as "man" gani, but as a different type of "people," bolgani ("flat" or "earth-bound people").

Some examples (with translation) of Burroughs' Mangani words follow.

• Tarzan = White-skin
• Mangani = Great Ape (also refers to humans)
• tarmangani = "Great White Apes," i.e., white-skinned people, such as Tarzan himself
• gomangani = "Great Black Apes," i.e., dark-skinned people,
• bolgani = "Flat Apes," i.e., gorillas.
• nala = up
• tand-nala = down
• Kreegah bundolo = "Beware; (I) kill!"
• Kagoda = "Surrender" (depending upon the inflection used, the word can be a demand for surrender or a concession of surrender)
• Numa = Lion