The Multi-lingual Ape-man
by Alan Hanson
A “Tarzan” — Webster defines
it as “a strong agile person of heroic proportions and bearing.”
To be sure, the original character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs brings
to mind the ultimate in physical abilities. Through repeated scenes of
the ape-man running through trees, wrestling with great apes, and plunging
his knife into the sides of enraged lions, Burroughs reinforced Tarzan’s
image as a magnificent physical creature. The idea, though, that Tarzan
was all brawn and no brain, an image perpetuated by the Weissmuller movies,
runs counter to the nature of Burroughs’ creation. Although he didn’t emphasize
it as much as he did the physical side of Tarzan, Burroughs clearly portrayed
his ape-man as being capable of great intellectual feats as well. As evidence
of that, consider how Tarzan taught himself to read English in Tarzan
of the Apes.
Throughout the Tarzan stories, one recurring reminder
of the ape-man’s intellect is his ability to quickly master a number of
different languages. There seemed to be no limit to the number of tongues
that Tarzan was capable of learning. In Tarzan the Terrible,
when the need to communicate with the natives of Pal-ul-don was so crucial
in his search for Jane, Tarzan was not worried. “Having already mastered
several languages and a multitude of dialects,” Burroughs noted, “the
ape-man felt that he could readily assimilate another even though this
appeared one entirely unrelated to any with which he was familiar.”
Was the ability to learn many languages just an intellectual
proclivity, or was there another reason (outside of plot necessities) why
Tarzan was a super linguist? Burroughs addressed that question, but before
answering it, a survey of the many languages Tarzan learned is in order.
The first language Tarzan heard was the English his parents
spoke during his first year of life. However, Tarzan would not learn to
speak that language until 20 years later. The first language he spoke,
the one he learned growing up, was that of the great apes. In a note to
Paul D’Arnot in Tarzan of the Apes, the ape-man, then 20
years old, explained, “I speak only the language of my tribe — the great
apes who were Kerchak’s; and a little of the languages of Tantor, the elephant,
and Numa, the lion, and of the other folks of the jungle I understand.”
It’s a stretch to classify Tarzan’s communications with elephants, lions,
and other jungle animals as languages, since on the verbal level there
was only one-way communication. Certainly Tarzan could make his wishes
known to these creatures by using words, but he understood them in return
only because of a highly refined intuitive sense that allowed him to interpret
their feral sounds and body movements.
Great Ape Language
There is no doubt, however, that the
great apes communicated through a real language, although it was quite
simple compared to human tongues. Twice in the Tarzan stories, Burroughs
briefly described this primitive language. First, in Tarzan, Lord
of the Jungle:
“Of course, in the meager language of the apes, their
conversation did not sound at all like a conversation between men, but
was rather a mixture of growls and grunts and gestures, which, however,
served every purpose that could have been served by the most formal and
correct of civilized speech since it carried its messages clearly to the
minds of both the Mangani and the Tarmangani.”
In the following passage from Tarzan at the Earth’s
Core, Burroughs again described the language of the great apes,
this time in a little more detail.
“The language of the great apes is not like our language.
It sounds to man like growling and barking and grunting punctuated at times
by shrill screams, and it is practically untranslatable to any tongue known
to man … It is a means of communicating thought and there its similarities
to the languages of men ceases.”
Of course, Tarzan’s introduction to the languages of men
came before he ever saw one of his fellow men. He was 10 years old when
he first began teaching himself to read English by using the books he found
in his father’s cabin. Burroughs revealed that, at the age of 18, Tarzan
could read English fluently, although, having never heard the language,
he could not speak a word of it.
European Languages
It wasn’t until he was 20 years old
that Tarzan first met Europeans, but once he did, within about seven months
he had learned to speak two European languages. First came French. After
Tarzan saved Paul D’Arnot from the stake in Mbonga’s village, the French
lieutenant began teaching his savior to speak French. “He was a most
eager student,” reported Burroughs, “and in two more days had mastered
so much French that he could speak little sentences such as: ‘That is a
tree,’ ‘this is grass,’ ‘I am hungry,’ and the like, but D’Arnot found
that it was difficult to teach him the French construction upon a foundation
of English.” Despite that complication, Tarzan learned French very
quickly. After just a week of coaching by D’Arnot, the two men could talk
“quite easily.” Although not much is said in the Tarzan stories
of Lord Greystoke’s continuing French lessons, he obviously went on to
master the language, for in Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar,
a Belgian military officer noted the “easy, fluent French” with
which the ape-man spoke.
By the end of Tarzan of the Apes, though,
Tarzan was also speaking English. He must have picked up the language in
Paris, probably from D’Arnot again, during his short stay there before
leaving for America to search for Jane. The language of his parents was
still new to him when he rescued Jane from a forest fire in Wisconsin.
There Tarzan explained to William Clayton, “You will pardon me if I
do not speak to you in English. I am just learning it, and while I understand
it fairly well I speak it very poorly.”
As to be expected when learning to speak a second language,
Tarzan found that his French interfered with his English pronunciation.
In The Return of Tarzan, Hazel Strong thought it peculiar
when she met him that “an Englishman should speak English with such
a marked French accent.” Also, during his work in Algeria for the French
government, Tarzan had to be careful which language he spoke. Burroughs
explained:
“Tarzan possessed a sufficient command of English to
enable him to pass among Arabs and Frenchmen as an American, and that was
all that was required of it. When he met an Englishman he spoke French
in order that he might not betray himself, but occasionally talked in English
to foreigners who understood that tongue, but could not note the slight
imperfections of accent and pronunciation that were his.”
Years later Burroughs made an interesting statement about
the way in which Tarzan learned to speak English. In Tarzan and the
Champion, written 26 years after Tarzan of the Apes,
the ape-man pointed to a dead elephant and asked “One-Punch Mullargan,
“You kill?” Burroughs then explained that, in this case, an angered
Tarzan was “reverting to the monosyllabic grunts which were reminiscent
of his introduction to English many years before.”
(Was this an effort by Burroughs to give some legitimacy
to the simplistic “Me Tarzan — You Jane” dialogue that had been
popularized in the three Weissmuller Tarzan movies released prior to the
1938 writing of Tarzan and the Champion? If so, the only
time the real Tarzan could have said “Me Tarzan — You Jane” would
have been in a tree in Wisconsin, not one in Africa. His English would
have improved well beyond that stage by the time he was reunited with Jane
in Africa a year later in The Return of Tarzan.)
Burroughs revealed in later stories that Tarzan had learned
to speak two other European languages. In Tarzan the Untamed,
he showed an excellent knowledge of German. In the story a German officer
noted how Tarzan spoke “in excellent German and the well-modulated tones
of culture.” Twice more the “excellent” modifier was used in
describing Tarzan’s German, and when he spoke the same language in Tarzan
and “The Foreign Legion”, Burroughs labeled it “impeccable.”
The author never explained when and why Tarzan learned to speak German.
It’s interesting that, although Burroughs gave Tarzan
the ability to speak German, he could not resist making Tarzan a party
to the hate for all things German that swept the United States during World
War I. In Tarzan the Untamed, Burroughs noted that a conversation
between Bertha Kircher and Tarzan was “carried on in German, a tongue
which he detested as much as he did the people who spoke it.”
The other European language that Tarzan spoke was Dutch,
but again, how he learned to speak it and for what purpose was never revealed.
We only know that in addressing a member of the Dutch resistance in Tarzan
and “The Foreign Legion”, Tarzan said, “I speak several languages,
including Dutch.” Perhaps Tarzan spoke other European languages, but
Burroughs only confirmed his knowledge of French, English, German, and
Dutch.
African Languages
When Tarzan returned to Africa in The
Return of Tarzan, he began learning the languages of his native
continent. The first was Arabic, a Semitic language that the spread of
Islam centuries before had made the prevailing speech of most of Northern
Africa. While in the service of the French government in Algeria, Tarzan
spent a couple of days with the Arab tribe of Kadour ben Saden. The sheik’s
daughter introduced the Englishmen to Arabic. “He commenced to acquire
the rudiments of their language under the pleasant tutorage of the brown-eyed
girl,” wrote Burroughs. The lessons in Arabic continued with the help
of Abdul, a young Arab boy who served as Tarzan’s companion for several
weeks. Knowledge of Arabic was useful to Tarzan, who in later years often
had to deal with desert intruders in his East African country. There are
scenes in which Tarzan speaks Arabic in The Son of Tarzan; Tarzan,
Lord of the Jungle, and Tarzan and the City of Gold.
Although Tarzan spent most of the rest of his life in
Central Africa, he knew none of the languages of its people when, at the
age of 21, he returned to his old stomping grounds in The Return
of Tarzan. Taking his proclivity for learning languages, it seems
odd that the naturally observant and inquisitive young Tarzan did not pick
up at least some of the speech of Mbonga’s tribe. He was known to have
spent much time as a youth observing the tribe, but, for some unknown reason,
their language remained an entire mystery to him. When Tarzan abducted
the native child Tibo in Jungle Tales of Tarzan, there was
a communication problem.
“It was quite certain to Tarzan that Go-bu-balu’s (Tibo)
speech was not talk at all. It sounded quite as senseless as the chattering
of the silly birds. It would be best, thought the ape-man, quickly to get
him among the tribe of Kerchak where he would hear the Mangani talking
among themselves. Thus, he would soon learn an intelligible form of speech.”
This is the only time when faced with a language barrier
that Tarzan forced another to learn his language rather than the other
way around.
The first native black African language that Tarzan learned
was that of the Waziri. “For weeks Tarzan lived with his savage friends,”
in The Return of Tarzan. “Quickly he learned their simple
speech.” Waziri is no doubt a tongue in the Bantu family of languages,
which are spoken generally south of a line from present-day Cameroon to
Kenya. Over the years covered by the Tarzan stories, the ape-man would
become familiar with many Bantu languages and dialects. By the time of
his first trip to Opar, he had picked up at least one more of these dialects,
which Burroughs referred to as “the mongrel tongue of the West Coast.”
We know that this speech is different from Waziri from the following statement
describing Tarzan’s first attempt to communicate with La. “She could
not understand him, though he tried French, English, Arab, Waziri, and,
as a final resort the mongrel tongue of the West Coast.” It was this
same language of the West Coast that Tarzan communicated with Mugambi in
The
Beasts of Tarzan.
By the end of The Son of Tarzan, Lord Greystoke
had settled on an estate in East Africa. As he claimed hegemony over a
large surrounding area, which he called “Tarzan’s country,” it became necessary
for the ape-man to become familiar with the languages and dialects of the
native tribes in his vast domain. The following passage from Tarzan
the Untamed shows that the ape-man had learned much. “Familiar
with the tribal idiosyncrasies of a great number of African tribes over
a considerable proportion of the Dark Continent, the Tarmangani at last
felt reasonable assured that he knew from what part of Africa this slave
had come, and the dialect of his people.”
Some of the specific Bantu tribal languages and dialects
that Tarzan spoke were Begego in Tarzan and the Lost Empire,
Utenga in Tarzan and the Leopard Men, Kaficho in Tarzan
and the City of Gold, Bukena in Tarzan’s Quest, and
Gallic in Tarzan the Magnificent. In addition, in Tarzan
and the Forbidden City, Tarzan and the Champion, and Tarzan
and “The Foreign Legion”, the ape-man spoke Swahili, which is a
Bantu language used for trade over much of East Africa and extending into
what was then the Congo.
Lost City Languages
Of course, in Tarzan’s Africa, the
well-traveled ape-man could not get by without learning the languages of
some of the lost races to be found there. The first one Tarzan learned
was the tongue of Pal-ul-don, where he went in search of his missing wife.
His tutors were Ta-den and Om-at, the two friends he made early in Tarzan
the Terrible.
“Either one or the other of them was almost constantly
coaching the ape-man during his waking hours. The result was only what
might have been expected — a rapid assimilation of the teachings to the
end that before any of them realized it, communication by word of mouth
became an accomplished fact.”
Tarzan must have perfected pronunciation of this language,
because when he entered the city of A-lur claiming to be the son of their
god, his speech was good enough to dupe the entire population.
Other “lost” African languages that Tarzan learned
were those of the ant men in the city of Trohandalmakus and of the people
of the Valley of Onthar in Tarzan in the City of Gold. Also,
while in Pellucidar, Tarzan learned the universal language of that land.
Interestingly enough, the ape-man never did learn the language of Opar.
When La first questioned Tarzan in The Return of Tarzan,
he responded, “I do not understand your language.” They soon discovered,
however, that they could converse in the language of the great apes, and
so Tarzan evidently never felt the need to learn Oparian.
Dead Languages
In other adventures, Tarzan learned
o speak two of what are today known as “dead languages.” When Tarzan
first heard his captors speak in Tarzan and the Lost Empire,
it was in a language he did not understand but which had a familiar sound.
Then after noticing the Roman dress of his captors, Tarzan recalled some
past studies he had undertaken.
“Now he knew why the language was so vaguely familiar,
for Tarzan, in his effort to fit himself for a place in the civilized world
into which necessity sometimes commanded him, had studied many things and
among them Latin, but the reading of Caesar’s Commentaries and scanning
Vergil do not give one a command of the language and words, though the
smattering that he had of the language was sufficient to make it sound
familiar when he heard others speak it.”
Later Tarzan spent three weeks in the home of Maximus
Praeclarus in Castra Sanguinarius, and during that time his host’s mother,
Festivitas, taught him to speak Latin. Thereafter, Tarzan had plenty of
opportunities to practice his new language, for Festivitas never tired
of hearing her guest tell stories of the world outside her valley and of
modern civilization.
The other “dead language” that Tarzan learned to
speak was Maya. It happened in The Quest of Tarzan, when
the ape-man found himself marooned with others on an island inhabited by
descendants of Mayan immigrants. After Tarzan saved the Mayan girl Itzl
Cha from the sacrificial altar of her people and brought her to the Europeans’
camp, the ape-man, according to Burroughs, “devoted much of his time
to learning the Maya tongue from her.”
Tarzan’s Mastery of Languages
The time has come, then, to call the
roll of all the languages that Tarzan of the Apes is known
to have learned to speak in the Tarzan books. They are, roughly in the
order that he learned them, Great Ape, French, English, Arabic, Waziri,
German, Dutch, Swahili, Pal-ul-don, Ant Men, Latin, Pellucidar, Onthar,
and Maya. That’s 14 distinct languages, and to that must be added an undetermined
number of Bantu languages and a “multitude” of native dialects.
No doubt Tarzan had some natural intellectual talent for
learning languages. However, according to Burroughs, there were a couple
of other factors that enhanced the ape-man’s remarkable ability to assimilate
language after language. First, one aspect of Tarzan’s character —
persistence — made the learning of languages easier for him compared to
those with lesser determination. For example, when he was in Pellucidar,
the ape-man became determined to learn the speech of that world. Burroughs
explained, “Considerable experience in learning new dialects and languages
rendered the task far from difficult and as the ape-man never for a moment
relinquished a purpose he intended to achieve, nor ever abandoned a task
that he had set himself until it had been successfully concluded, he made
rapid progress.”
The other factor that might have made languages easy for
Tarzan to learn comes from an unusual theory that Burroughs explained in
the following passage from Tarzan At the Earth’s Core.
“For years Tarzan had considered the language of the
great apes as the primitive root language of created things. The great
apes, the lesser apes, the gorillas, the baboons and the monkeys utilized
this with various degrees of refinement and many of the words were understood
by jungle animals of other species and by many of the birds; but, perhaps
after the fashion that our domestic animals have learned many of the words
in our vocabulary, with this difference that the language of the great
apes has doubtless persisted unchanged for countless ages.”
If the language of the great apes is indeed the “primitive
root language of created things,” then Tarzan’s first language gave
him the groundwork on which he could build an understanding of any other
language he came across. Thus Tarzan easily learned languages that seemingly
have nothing in common because all languages have something in common with
the tongue of the great apes.
Whatever its source, Tarzan’s ability to quickly learn
so many languages was an example of the great intellectual power he possessed.
The fact that Burroughs gave Tarzan this ability was an example of his
belief that the ideal man must be strong in both body and mind.
The End
