I think the syntax is not too far off from C. I am not affiliated with the project, only supporing it on Patreon, so I cannot speak about the designer's intent

I think the syntax is not too far off from C. I am not affiliated with the project, only supporing it on Patreon, so I cannot speak about the designer's intentions with Zig specifically. Generally in language design, if something works the same way as in other languages, that's great. You can re-use the keywords/syntax and build on peoples prior knowledge. However if you have some feature that actually works quite a bit differently from other languages the syntax should probably be different. Otherwise people might feel at home right away on a superficial level, but actually get bitten by the surprising ways in which the new thing works differently to the one they are used to later.