Page:Jungle Tales of Tarzan.djvu/88

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Jungle Tales of Tarzan

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.

Thus it was an imposing word which Tarzan made of God. The masculine prefix of the apes is bu, the feminine mu; g Tarzan had named la, o he pronounced tu, and d was mo. So the word God evolved itself into Bulamutumumo, or, in English, he-g-she-o-she-d.

Similarly he had arrived at a strange and wonderful spelling of his own name. Tarzan is derived from the two ape words tar and zan, meaning white skin. It was given him by his foster mother, Kala, the great she-ape. When Tarzan first put it into the written language of his own people he had not yet chanced upon either white or skin in the dictionary; but in a primer he had seen the picture of a little white boy and so he wrote his name bumude-wutomuro, or he-boy.

To follow Tarzan's strange system of spelling would be laborious as well as futile, and so we shall in the future, as we have in the past, adhere to the more familiar forms of our grammar school copybooks. It would tire you to remember that do meant b, tu o. and ro y, and that to say he-boy you must prefix the ape masculine gender sound bu before the entire word and the feminine gender sound mu before each of the lower-case letters which go to make up boy—it would tire you and it would bring