ape-english.htm
ape-english_comments.htm
english-ape.htm (incomplete)
One official reference about the MGM Tarzan films using some Swahili is the bonus interview feature called "Tarzan: Silver Screen King of the Jungle" (section "Casting Jane") in the DVD set "The Tarzan Collection." The following consecutive quotes are from that feature:
Scott Tracy Griffin:
In the novels Burroughs created a whole language for Tarzan that the apes spoke.
In the films they used a combination of Swahili and made-up words.
One of my favorite is "umgawa," which can mean anything you want it to mean.
It could mean "stop," "go away," "come here," "danger," "elephant carry boy to safety."
Umgawa's a terrific word that is another of our cultural touchstones.
Rudy Behlman:
And originally it meant "get down," but as time progressed and the movies went on,
it seemed to have a multiple layer of meaning.
Another commonly quoted reference is the following post on the Internet:
"The native language was at first borrowed from the local tribes that
Van Dyke had worked with during the African expedition for Trader Horn.
Some words like "igmoo" (house), "pasi, pasi" (hurry up) and "mahowani"
(elephants) found their way into the early Tarzan features. Even the
(in)famous "umgawa" (get down) was borrowed, and became an all-purpose
expression which could mean anything the context required. Later
expressions like "wakashinda nippa doo" and "oona toona beebee" were
sheer inventions, and both Sheffield and Weissmuller carried them with
them to the RKO Tarzan films, and they became part of Bomba, the Jungle
Boy's vocabulary as well."
http://umgawa.bands.uiuc.edu/pipermail/fossils/2004-April/000505.html (2-11-05)
But the following online Swahili dictionary contains almost none of the words
from that reference:
http://research.yale.edu/cgi-bin/swahili/main.cgi (2-22-05)
No Swahili word in the above reference is even close to the words "mahowani,"
"igmoo/igmu," or "umgawa,"
and neither do their supposed English equivalents
turn up anything resembling those supposedly Swahili words.
More perplexing is that an Internet search of those words turns up no African
text that uses them. Maybe they are from an obscure African language?
Or maybe too little of Africa is yet online?
Nevertheless, Swahili is a great language to study for anyone who likes Africa movies. Consider the following advantages of Swahili:
One fact weighing against the theory that Burroughs modeled his names after Swahili is that Tarzan of the Apes was set on the west coast of Africa, whereas Swahili is more common on the east coast. The Kongo language sounds like a better candidate to me. It's from the Congo region of Africa, which is both jungle and coastal, Kongo is related to Swahili, and that language contains words beginning with "mb-" and having apostrophes, just as in Ape.
Ape-English Vocabulary
Words grouped by subject and dichotomy.
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Tarzan/tarzan.vocab.html (2-15-05)
Ape-English Dictionary
Words highlighted by subject.
http://www.erblist.com/erbmania/tangor/ape-english.html (2-15-05)
Ape-English Dictionary
Regular text, no groupings.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dimension/4511/apedict.html (2-15-05)
[2]
"In Swahili, 'Simba' means lion, 'Rafiki' means friend, 'Shenzi' means uncivilized,
and 'Pumbaa' is a lump or round ball. There are many Swahili references throughout the film,
and we can assume it takes place in Tanzania or Kenya,
since Mt. Kilimanjaro is shown in several scenes."
http://www.moviemistakes.com/film747/trivia (2-14-05)
[3]
"They draw on music traditions from Tanzania, Ghana and the Gambia,
and their live show features an impressive array of instruments,
including the Swahili kalimba (thumb piano), the gonge (one string fiddle),
the Dagarti balo (xylophone), the Ghana atenteben (flute),
and the West African Fontonfron drums."
http://www.sq-chapel-arts.demon.co.uk/event227.htm (2-14-05)
[4]
Mbonga is a language of Cameroon.
Cameroon is located near the Republic of the Congo, and therefore is near the Congo River and jungle area.
This is more evidence that the Tarzan story was set in west Africa instead of east Africa,
and that the terms in that novel derive from Kongo (or maybe Mbonga) instead of Swahili.
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=XMB (2-14-05)
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/cm.html (2-27-05)
[5]
http://si.unm.edu/linguistics/swahili/swahili (2-15-05)
[6]
Liane, Jungle Goddess.
africa_films.htm#liane
[7]
For those who haven't seen or heard of a kalimba, here's what a kalimba looks like:
This photo is from:
http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/textk/Kalimba.html (2-16-05)
In the movie King Solomon's Mines
(section "Between you two") there is an example of a large kalimba being played,
and the theme song for Daktari
has kalimba in it.
[8]
Swahili, more correctly called Kiswahili, is the most important language of East Africa.
It is the official language of both Tanzania and Kenya, and is also spoken in Uganda,
Rwanda, Burundi, and Zaire. (In Zaire a separate dialect is spoken, known as Kingwana.)
Swahili is the mother tongue of perhaps only a million people,
but at least 10 million more speak it fluently as a second language,
and many millions more at least understand it to some degree.
Katzner, Kenneth. 1986. The Languages of the World. New York: Routledge. pp. 300-301.