Pakuni

PAKUNI
Spoken in:	Land of the Lost
Timeline/Universe:	*here* ... or perhaps *elsewhere*
Total speakers:	unspecified
Genealogical classification:	Commercial conlang drawing inspiration from West African languages
Basic word order:	SVO
Morphological type:	inflecting
Created by:
Victoria Fromkin	1974

Pakuni is the largest mainstream conlang in book, TV, or movies, and indeed extremely influential in the history of conlangs and mainstream conlangs, despite its neglect by the conlang community. It is also the first conlang in TV or movies ( Burrough's works being proto-conlangs, merely words ). "Game of Thrones" TV Series' "Dothraki" may be larger. It is the largest because a TV Series is a very large format, "Land of the Lost" covering 43 episodes in 3 seasons 1974-1977. Despite novel series being a larger format still, most do not include much conlang material, even "The Lord of the Rings".

"Pakuni" in this article is actually used as an umbrella term for all conlang and proto-conlang material in "Land of the Lost" TV Series, movies, etc, including the proto-conlangs of Sleestak (they do more than hiss) and the Altrusians, among others.

Concept

Pakuni is the language of a race of hominids that inhabit the Land of the Lost, an alien-created "closed universe" in a fictional multi-verse developed for the early 1970s (US) television series of the same name. Rather than inflict the usual grunts, Pig Latin or backwards English on the television audience, the producers of the series evidently thought a superior solution would be to actually invent a language. UCLA linguist Victoria Fromkin was subsequently approached for the project. This was done under pressure from educators to put educational content in their programs. (Too bad she wasn't also contracted to do something about the chronically hissing Sleestaks...)

Place in Conlang History

"Land of the Lost" was extremely well-made and well-received in its day, and influenced many films and TV Series, especially for conlangs and pseudo-conlangs. The mostly pseudo-conlangs and conlangs of Star Wars were based on Pakuni, notably, just as Chewbacca and his interactions were based on Chaka. Unfortunately for conlangers, "Star Wars" was even more well-received and continued the "Land of the Lost" Season 3 backlash against conlang-presence with its 1977 movie filled with comic whistle- and growl- pseudo-conlangs. Perhaps this was done to save money or because "Flash Gordon" and other cinematic or otherwise predecessors lacked fully-developed conlangs. 1983 "Return of the Jedi" with its Quechua-inspired Huttese reflected a resurgence of conlang interest in the mainstream, which built until "Klingon" appeared in the 1984's "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" and was presented in 1984's "The Klingon Dictionary" and well-received, paving the way for the "Avatar" Golden Age of Conlangs at-present. This is to be followed by "The Ragnarok of Conlangs" wherein all aliens will speak Pig Latin for the next 100 years.

Grammatical Description from Canonical Sources

The language is SVO and has a simple inventory of five vowels (a, e, i, o, u, all in their continental pronunciation).

In keeping with the educational nature of the language, parts of speech are similar to English and distinctly marked morphologically. Verbs feature the bare root, to which is added -sa for the Adjective, then perhaps an initial Thematic Vowel indicative of semantic-based Noun Class, and then -chi for the Adverb. Prepositions and Particles are unmarked, like verbs. Roots are also used to form verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so forth.

Fromkin based her language on roots derived from the Ewe Family of Bantu in West Africa, the language family dearest to Fromkin's work.

Associate Conscripts

"The Builder" episode 2-10 featured a made-up alphabet (based on Roman upper-case) associated with The Builder, representative of a presumbable cross-multi-verse humanoid seeder-race, a la Star Trek. The Sleestak are also given mathematical annotation ( simple pseudo-cuneiform) in episode 3-10 "The Guardian". Both read like English.

The movie features a very well-made hieroglyphic script for Pakuni, based on mostly Oracle Bone Script Chinese ( 1500 BC ) with some Indus Valley Script ( 2500 BC ) and possibly other earth Eurasian logographic systems, such as Archaic Egyptian. It reads horizontally right to left within blocks, though writing direction is perhaps not intended. The choice of horiztonal over vertical writing is interesting as Sumerian and Egyptian at earliest were majority vertical, whereas Indus was horizontal and right to left, horizontal later becoming popular about 1500 BC (though not in China).

Overall Status of Conlang Corpus Decipherment and Developments

The great Pakuni lone pioneer, alone braving the desolate years, has gathered 3 sources likely from Fromkin herself giving tantalizing hints, and indeed its Rosetta Stones, as to the full and secret nature of Pakuni : a 1975 "TV Guide" article from Sept. 11th in year before the Bicentennial, a recent "PuffnStuff and Stuff" book section, and a Linguistics exam exercise from Fromkin.

Aside from this, there was no complete wordlist given by Fromkin, no corpus of all transcribed and otherwise Pakuni, interlinearly translated or otherwise, no, nothing of the sort.

Later Conlangs and Death of Dr. Victoria Fromkin

Fromkin went on to make the 1998 conlang "Vampire" for the very popular "Blade", also left undeciphered by the author. It featured similar use of natural assimilation and attention to word etymology and inter-relations, though a much, much smaller corpus. She died in 2000.

Perhaps she took the secrets of Pakuni with her to the grave. The 2009 "Land of the Lost" movie's director says that he and Jorma tried to find out about Pakuni, but Jorma's pseudo-Pakuni in the movie reveals he only got as far as Nels Olsens's wordlist, not reading about the language's grammatical structure nor the Sources upon which this was based. Yet perhaps among her papers there is still some further hints, or even more than that.

The Nels Olsen Decipherment Contribution

A fellow by name of Nels Olsen has done a good job of scouring the episodes of the show for information about this conlang. Although Pakuni is by no means a fully developed language, such as has been uncovered can by reviewed here:

• Grammar
• Lexicon

The Keran Shadlag 2014 Decipherment Contribution

Yet another chap addressed as "Shadlag", who deciphered Dr. Marc Okrand's "Atlantis : The Lost Empire" 2001 conlang and Paul Frommer's 2012 "John Carter" Barsoomian conlang also made a major contribution to Pakuni decipherment studies, following the trail blazed by the great Olsen. His entire works thereon are forthcoming, yet rough draft version of his major documents are available here :

• Complete TV Series Corpus with Decipherment Notes and Dictionary of Unique Words

Though in a Sept. 11, 1975 TV Guide article, Fromkin says that there are 300 words and counting, Shadlag only found about 215. He found that the phonemic inventory was as follows : a e i o u , b c d f g i j k m n p r s sh t w y ng 9 , with allophone pairs of / r l / , / f v / , / s z / , / h 9 / * 9 = Glottal Stop *. Syllables can begin with glottal stops and end in nasals. There are prepositions and no postpositions. There is one example of emphatic VSO word order. There are Emphatic particles at the beginning of sentences and a Question particle for the end. Nouns in sequence have an implied (and) . The Genitive is formed by placing the possessor after the possessed : / painting i-ban / (of) Cavedad.name TA /.

The corpus is notable in containing many examples of the various Speech Errors for which Fromkin is famous. It also contains extensive assimilation and taboo deformation.

Certain aspects of the language are the same or very similar to English. The gestures and quasi-language noises ( English Ah! ) are the same as in English. The words for / yes no I you / are the similar / yo no me ye /. These things were done accidently and/or on pupose perhaps to make it easier on the actors and language-learners.

He lauds the work of Olsen as pioneering, daring, and essential. Yet, Shadlag criticizes Olsen's work as lacking a corpus with sufficient documentation and decipherment notes. He also suspects that Olsen did not view all the episodes (even Season 3), as there are many obvious words upon which Olsen is silent. Shadlag suspects that Olsen is a professionally-trained Linguist, yet lacking in decipherment experience and familiarity with Fromkin's conlangs, both of which Shadlag claims in some measure. Shadlag claims that Olsen's work lacks methodological rigor, and yet is excellent in its effort and even in its many fruits.

Jorma Taccone's "pseudo-Pakuni" in 2009 Movie

Nonethless, Olsen's work was used as a basis for Jorma's "pseudo-Pakuni" (so-called by Shadlag) for the 2009 mega-flop "Land of the Lost". Shadlag claims to have deciphered all of Jorma's work and that despite claims by the Director in the DVD's audio commentary, Jorma just used the word list on Olsen's website without reading (or heeding or understanding) anything about word-order or parts-of-speech morphology. Jorma's Pakuni is a re-lex of English, although the Director assures us that LL fans who try will be able to find that Jorma stayed true to the TV Series' Pakuni, which is actually partly true. Some of Jorma's Pakuni is based also based on sloppy misunderstanding of TV Series Pakuni. Shadlag thinks they should have hired a conlanger or found one to work for free. Jorma's invented Pakuni words often sound like English words, though some may be a priori or from natural languages, his name being Finnish for "George", / apple magala OR margala / < / English magarita / etc. Jorma's work is actually historic in representing the most obscene mainstream conlang since "Gargantua and Pantagruel" 's 1564 Greek-based proto-conlang. It's also a first for historic conlangs as the Fromkin portion of Jorma's work still classifies it as a conlang, despite his contributions.

External Links:

• Land of the Lost
• TV Guide article, Fromkin's dictionary pages