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Volume 3560

MANGANI GRAMMAR
by Jairo Uparella
A Detailed Expansion of the Mangani-Ape/English Language
Created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Series of Tarzan Books

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Introduction

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Mangani is considered one of the more fascinating fictional languages, since its grammar allows any person to understand it quickly, because of its simplicity and structural organization. Currently, Mangani has been developed with a similarity to many African languages, but without the grammatical complexity of these dialects. In order to learn Mangani you should take into account some basic rules as a guide in the way that it has to be expressed.

This new compendium allows readers to understand the language more accurately and to create complete sentences with actions, predicates and implicit subject, by using parts of the sentence that are complied strictly in the Mangani.

Although in the course of the investigation new words were generated, they combine perfectly with the words created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912. The textual content of the novels and therefore the cartoons in the comics, will not change. Today the Mangani is a complete language, understandable and widespread, which follows the same trend originally proposed in the novels.

From about 340 words, Mangani currently has more than 2500 words etymologically related to the former.  Although we can create any sentence with this language, it has been determined to specify their areas and contexts of use, framed by their origins in the novels. These contexts are: Anatomy, Animals, Botany, Colors, Dressing, Family, Political Structure, Geography, Nouns, Verbs and Weapons. The respective words were grouped in a dictionary which can be obtained at Burroughs' Ape Language Compilations

There is still much to investigate and develop in relation to this language. This is a good start which gives us the ability to take you to other areas or contexts, looking for a way to keep an updated language model that can express aspects of natural life in an ape-man relationship.

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Main research

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Through reading and studying the pages of the novel Tarzan of the Apes, comics, and many other documents related to apes, the way they communicate, the sounds they emit, etc., we established this complete compendium, starting from the place where Tarzan was born and the lands around that point, on the African occidental coast.

We have explained how the influence of Bantú, Portuguese and Spanish could generate many dialects around those places, where many tribes of black men adopted their languages. In the same way,  we explained how a child could produce some words in a natural context, expressed by his own creativity, since his biological constitution was in perfect condition having listened to his mother during his first year of life.

This hypothesis gave us the idea that in effect the language could be generated by naming the different species, events and sensations that we can find in a big forest, instead of by imitating those sounds, according to the thought of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  www.erbzine.com/mag21/2112.html

But the first words created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, did not seem to obey any specific order, so we started by studying them, understanding the context of each word, organizing them in groups, and later their syntax, to produce the new words that would give the aspect as an African language.

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Grammatical Rules

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These are the different parts of the Mangani grammar
we could establish as rules in order to be more easily understood:

Adriana y Jairo Uparella

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