u/salivanto

When I was a kid, I was just the right age to enjoy the Kroft TV show Land of The Lost. Later, I learned Esperanto and saw that the "Pakuni" language from the show was on lists of "conlangs" there on the early internet.

In 2009, I decided to learn Pakuni by memorizing the "300 words" in the dictionary. I thought it would be a weekend project. It turned out, however, that there was very little information available on the language. I created a dictionary by transcribing every bit of Pakuni dialog from the show and piecing it together.

I had no idea that one day, this would get me an invitation to share the stage with the original cast of the TV show!

https://preview.redd.it/v10kh1btmqwg1.png?width=752&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b31001686832b99eab786ccefd276e2dacbb11c

See this Reddit post in the Land of the Lost subreddit for full context of these photos.

Pakuni (or Paku) was created by linguist Victoria Fromkin in an attempt to make the TV show "educational". My understanding is that it's the first seriously developed constructed language for modern visual media - well before Klingon.

Fromkin based the language on the Bantu languages, so nouns have a prefix to show whether they represent people, animals, or things.

I completed my Complete Dictionary of the language in 2009. In 2014, David Peterson - a name I didn't recognize at the time - reached out to me on behalf of the LCS and offered to put my notes on Fiat Lingua.

https://fiatlingua.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/fl-00001D-00.pdf

Warning - it's about 5 pages of neatly typed overview and 11 pages of hand-written scribble. I regret that more than 12 years later I've yet to provide them with a more legible version!

I never posted the full video of the panel discussion with the LOTL cast, but it was a remarkable experience. I was just goofing off trying to learn a fictional language, and then there I was fielding questions from the original Paku family about the language they spoke in the show.

Hello Conlangers! I would love to get your feedback about the best way to handle this. You may have seen the multiple posts from Larry Rogers (self-identified also as PreparationRound2657 on reddit) about the Pakuni language. For some reason, he can't say anything without talking trash about some of the people in the photos below.

https://preview.redd.it/x0hpdxt3rpwg1.png?width=752&format=png&auto=webp&s=543687387ebb92cce8935cab22a87f37815804cc

See this Reddit post in the Land of the Lost subreddit for full context of these photos.

Ordinarily, I think it would be best to just quietly ignore the posts or report them to the moderators, but it's become clear that PreparationRound2657 has blocked me here on reddit, so I can't really see the posts now. He is however mentioning me (Thomas Alexander) by name in these posts.

>Minor Esperantist Thomas Alexander in 2018 published a decipherment contribution in the Language Creation Society online magazine but I remember it being not a full decipherment at all and rather unskilled. He told me he had made it some years before 2018, if I remember now 8 years hence.

>Nels Olsen has had a website (Pop Apostle) extensive decipherment contribution that I maybe referenced but I remember it was not very well done and that my decipherment and interlinear glossed corpus far exceeded his decipherment contribution. Nels Olsen maybe made that webpage decipherment contribution in 2002 or so, I forget offhand.

>I have read of a few other efforts to document and decipher the 1974 to 1976 Pakuni language, and probably there were thousands or millions over the years. But without professional Language Scientist skills, only me and maybe Zender certainly accomplished much.

For the record, I have met Nels Olsen in person (see photos) and have corresponded in some detail with Mark Zender. Both are very knowledgable, modest, and - can I add - inherently likable people. Pop Apostle, was run by someone named Clayton. I never got to know him very well, but he seemed like a good guy too.

It has been Larry's style to talk trash about people, then block them, all while talking up how smart he is since at least 2014 when I first corresponded with him by email. He posted this publicly here yesterday shortly before blocking me.

https://preview.redd.it/xhauirx9rpwg1.png?width=743&format=png&auto=webp&s=8aff285f56d54e006b58803c17af8653b9e827c9

It's funny that he included his FB contact info since he's had me blocked there since 2018.

The whole thing is kind of sad. There are certainly thousands or tens of thousands of Land of the Lost fans who remember a few words of Pakuni. (The show was viewed in millions of households). The original cast continues to tour. Nels (and Clayton) did an amazing thing putting out good information about the language for fans who wanted to know more.

Maybe I just want to say that there is indeed drama-free information out there for people who love the show, or want to know about fictional languages in major media from well before Klingon.

A few final points:

• I began looking into Pakuni seriously in 2009 when I thought it would be simply a matter of looking up a dictionary and memorizing 300 words.
• I worked with Nels, and Clayton - and briefly with someone named Laurel (who made up a fan-version of the language), as I transcribed all the Pakuni dialog from the show, compared it to Clayton's, and gave everybody the opportunity to give me feedback.
• I posted about this in real time back in the day on the Conlangs list and received useful feedback from Jim Henry, Donald Boozer, Paul Harzer, Alex Fink and perhaps others.
• It was in August 2009 when I completed the manuscript of my Complete Dictionary of Pakuni listing every word used on screen in the show, with in-cannon examples of the word being used.
• January 2014 - Larry reached out to me - and the whole world to announce what he'd accomplished.
• A few days later, David Peterson reached out to me and kindly offered to put my manuscript on Fiat Lingua. I regret that now more than 12 years later I've yet to provide them with a more legible version!

I thought some people here might enjoy these screen grabs of the actors who played the Pakuni: Phillip Paley, Sharon Baird, and Joe Giamalva. I had the honor of sharing the floor with them for a panel discussion about the Paku language in Milwaulkee, in 2018.

https://preview.redd.it/lse5djkx1nwg1.png?width=1013&format=png&auto=webp&s=cbb3d40186c030268454acfd839e16348201e5f1

https://preview.redd.it/f0jmb2pe2nwg1.png?width=1406&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9f7bc32d90b66e11a36240b9ee77700029249ee

My mother-in-law was VERY impressed that I'd met Sharon, because she remembers Sharon from The Mickey Mouse club. The whole cast was great - very approachable, but I would also want to quickly add that I was also very honored to meet Nels P. Olsen (far right in the lower photo), the author of the most quoted Pakuni dictionary on the internet.

Some of you may have noticed some of the posts from PreparationRound2657 about the Pakuni language. Quite frankly, I think he is not well. I don't mean to drag anybody into the middle of any drama, but I would like to point out this one thing:

>Minor Esperantist Thomas Alexander in 2018 published a decipherment contribution in the Language Creation Society online magazine but I remember it being not a full decipherment at all and rather unskilled. 

I'm the Thomas Alexander in question. That's me on the far left of the lower photo in one of the moments I'm going to remember for the rest of my life. Nels said that being able to be on stage with the Pakuni family was a dream come true. I didn't even dare to dream.

I've had run ins with Larry (PreparationRound2657) before. His pattern is to apologize to me and then block me -- which is what he did here. I suspect that this is why he deleted the previous version of his post and reposted it without my commentary - so my apologies for that.

I would like to say that I love The Land of the Lost -- and all the more now that Wesley and all them made me feel so welcome in 2018. Nels Olsen and Mark Zender (mentioned by Larry in his posts) are great people and very knowledgeable about the Paku language. I'd be glad to try to answer questions too.