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THE NAME OF TARZAN David Bruce Bozarth Copyright © 1999
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It's a wonder we ever found out Tarzan's name! Luckily for us, Edgar Rice Burroughs set it down simply the first time around and then waited until the sixth book of the series to let us know how Tarzan wrote his own name.From Jungle Tales:
Of course he did not pronounce God as you or I would pronounce His name, for Tarzan knew naught of the spoken language of his English forbears; but he had a name of his own invention for each of the little bugs which constituted the alphabet. Unlike the apes he was not satisfied merely to have a mental picture of the things he knew, he must have a word descriptive of each. In reading he grasped a word in its entirety; but when he spoke the words he had learned from the books of his father, he pronounced each according to the names he had given the various little bugs which occurred in it, usually giving the gender prefix for each.Burroughs' flair for character, critter, and place names throughout his works, is legendary among writers and fans of speculative and fantastic fiction. The "name of Tarzan" as illustrated in the quote above gives us some insight into the creative process that ERB applied so frequently in his stories.
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