Pakuni

PAKUNI
Spoken in:	Land of the Lost
Timeline/Universe:	Land of the Lost multi-verse, the Pakuni most likely being hominids from Earth
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

Introduction

Pakuni is a conlang created for the Paku, a race of humanoids that inhabit the Land of the Lost, a parallel universe 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 (Sid and Marty Kroft) thought a superior solution would be to actually invent a language. To that end, UCLA professor and linguist Victoria Fromkin was subsequently approached for the project.

While not the first conlang used a public art media (certainly Tolkien's Elvish languages and Esperanto predate it), it does appear to be the first properly constructed language used in a television show or movie.

Place in Conlang History

Pakuni is of interest to the conlanging community primarily as a matter of historical fact. Later inventions, such as Klingon and Na'vi, are certainly more well known. Whether or not any of their creators took any inspiration from the work of this earlier language maker, we would do well to keep in mind these humbler beginnings of conlangs on television.

One common gripe many fans (and especially fans who are also conlangers) have had about sci-fi and fantasy movies is the abysmal quality of their aliens' languages. At worst, what is heard in the theatre is just garbled English or backwards French. At best, the audience is treated to a mish-mash of random and ill-conceived fake words (i.e., a very poorly made naming language). Anymore, Okrand and Frommer and Peterson have raised the bar immensely, perhaps even to the point where the public is now expecting an alternate world and its peoples to come complete with actual languages. It is simply the case that Fromkin was showing them how to do it, way back in the 1970s.

Forms of the Language

There are three different forms of Pakuni that need to be distinguished. The first is Fromkin's own work, which as noted was done for the original television series. Later fans of her work have created their own derivative conlangs, which can become the cause of confusion for anyone seeking information about Fromkin's work. To add further potential confusion, the television show was remade in the 1990s and a motion picture was also produced, both of which include Pakuni of a sort.

Grammatical Description

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

Parts of speech are similar to English and have distinctly marked morphologically. This is of course not to say that Pakuni mimics English or that it is a relex. It has some features more similar to Swahili than English (the prefixed semantic classes of nouns, for example). Nouns feature the bare root, to which is added -sa for the Adjective, the various noun class markers, 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.

According to Wikipedia: "Pakuni shares similarities to the Kwa languages of West Africa. It has regular ante-penultimate stress, homorganic nasals, nasalization of vowels before nasals, and deletion of final vowels before vowel initial suffixes." Pakuni simply means "people" in this language (paku being the singular form).

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 Ɂ , with allophonic pairs of / r l / , / f v / , / s z / and / h Ɂ /. Syllables can begin with glottal stops and can end in nasals. There are prepositions but no postpositions. There is one example of emphatic VSO word order. Emphatic particles come first in a sentence while the interrogative particle comes at the end. Nouns in sequence have an implied conjunction. The possessive is formed by placing the possessor after the possessed : / painting i-ban / (of) Cavedad.name TA /.

Certain aspects of the language are the same or very similar to English. The gestures and quasi-language noises (like English Ah!) are the same as in English. The words for yes, no, I, & you are the rather similar yo, no, me, & ye. These things were probably done puposefully, perhaps in order to make it easier for the actors and program watchers to learn!

Writing Systems

Several writing systems are employed in both the television show and in the later movie: one is an alphabet (based on Roman upper-case) associated with The Builders; another is that of the the Sleestaks who are also given mathematical annotation (simple pseudo-cuneiform). Both read like English.

The movie features a very well-made hieroglyphic script for Pakuni, based on mostly Oracle Bone Script Chinese with some influence from Indus Valley Script and possibly other early Eurasian logographic systems, such as Archaic Egyptian. It reads horizontally right to left within blocks, though writing direction is perhaps not intended.

Overall Status of Conlang Corpus

Apart from whatever may be gleaned from the episodes of the television series, there are really only three further reliable sources of information about the language. There is a 1975 "TV Guide" article from 11th September; a more recent "PuffnStuff and Stuff" book section; and a Linguistics exam exercise from Fromkin in which she used Pakuni matieral.

Aside from this, there is no complete grammar or wordlist created by Fromkin, and of course no large corpus of texts.

Later Conlang and Death of Dr. Victoria Fromkin

It is also of interest to the conlanging community to note that Dr. Fromkin later went on to make the conlang Vampire for the series Blade (1988), which is also left undeciphered by the author. It features similar use of natural assimilation and attention to word etymology as her earlier work, though has a much, much smaller corpus. Fromkin passed over in 2000, joining the likes of St. Hildegard and Dr. Tolkien in the Halls of Mandos.

It seems likely that she took the remaining secrets of Pakuni with her to the grave, barring any notes that might have been preserved among her papers. In 2009, the director and actors of the Land of the Lost movie say that they tried to find out about Pakuni, but the "pseudo-Pakuni" in the movie reveals that they got little further than Nels Olsen's wordlist (infr.). It does not seem that this particular iteration of the language involves Fromkin's grammatical structure nor the other sources named. Yet perhaps among her papers there is still some further hints, or perhaps, even more than that.

Decipherment Efforts

Nels Olsen's Contribution

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

• Grammar
• Lexicon

Thomas Alexander's Contribution

Stay tuned for further developments!

Keran Shadlag's Contribution

Another attempt to work on Pakuni can be found here, in an at present very rough draft form:

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

(NOTE: these files consist of PDF, RTF and TXT documents!)

Jorma Taccone's "pseudo-Pakuni" for the 2009 Movie

Entirely as an aside to Fromkin's conlang, Olsen's work was used as a basis for "pseudo-Pakuni", the Pakuni based words used by actors in the 2009 movie. As already noted, this form of Pakuni does not take into account Fromkin's earlier grammar.

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External Links:

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