I want to announce online that I've just made the largest contribution thus far to the decipherment of Dr. Victoria Fromkin's "Pakuni", the largest mainstream conlang ( books, TV, movies) ever (except maybe Dothraki from Game of Thrones).
Here's free rough drafts of the major documents. I hope to put it all online and polished :
https://app.box.com/s/gh5my7i3ztlet8wmjs2t
Thank-you for letting me post this. Can anyone recommend other conlang or Land of the Lost forums where I should post this ? I tried to contact Nels Olsen, the only other decipherment contributor.
I live a 3rd World existence, don't have the internet, and don't get on too often. I might not get back to this thread to respond to anyone or might do so quickly. You can e-mail me at gmann at inbox.com or message me at this Zompist account.
I'd been looking into historic mainstream conlangs for a while and got curious about Nels Olsen's work. Everyone thought it was comprehensive but it turns out it wasn't, though pioneering. He only made a dictionary, so I made a corpus with decipherment notes and a dictionary ( wordlist ).
Some things about Pakuni of interest :
As I said, it's probably the largest mainstream conlang, over 43 half-hour episodes. It's supposed to be a caveman or hominid language, but it's based on Proto-Ewe-Bantu or just Ewe-Bantu languages because those were the ones most familiar to Fromkin. However, this aids in decipherability. I've studied some Bantu and I think it does Bantu things overall. It was made to teach kids English grammar, so all parts of speech are marked morphologically, like Esperanto. She put out some incomplete but helpful wordlists but never published a full corpus with internlinear translation and lexicography etc. It's SVO with Noun Adjective, Verb Adverb maybe, and prepositions. There's no grammatical cases, it's all word order. Pronouns and nouns get plurals, and there's no tone yet the words are very short. It's "hominid" character is represented by it using an economy of words to say many things and its word roots are somewhat more transparent, again like a tonal language. It has verb tense, though for a while I didn't think that it did.
It has 3 conscripts associated with it, an alphabet similar to English associated with alien astronaut characters in episode 2-10 "The Builders" and numerical or mathematical proto-conscript ( just evocative marks ) in 3-10 "The Guardian". The 2009 "Land of the Lost" movie has a really well-made proto-conscript hieroglyphic writing system ( proto- because it's probably not a real hieroglyphic script, just looks like one ). It's actually the best mainstream hieroglyphic script I ever saw, after the one in "Transformers". "Dark Crystal" had one but it wasn't so well done and looked like retarded Egyptian and was not too extensive.
Her Roman Alphabet trascription system for Pakuni was very well done, much better than Avatar's, along the lines of Atlantean.
Another notable feature of Pakuni is how very popular "Land of the Lost" was and how influential it has been on Western cinema and TV ever since. Star Wars and the entire history of conlangs were very strongly influenced by Pakuni, though Fromkin didn't explain it and people didn't get too into it ( as far as my limited internet research has shown), and I think the two are connected. Fromkin seemed to have this idea that people could just decipher her language on their own and share it with eachother or learn it by watching, despite it actually being rather complicated, there being many words with low frequency of occurence, etc.
I think I was able to decipher about 80% of the corpus with certainty due to hints in the dialogue and given word lists, but I could be wrong about that. I was actually able to propose even guesses for the remaining 20%, so the whole thing is quite available right now. It wasn't easy, though. I transcribed the conlangs in 43 episodes and then used Word search function to compare occurences with given words and the roots therein. I might go get some Ewe materials so I can get an even better idea.
Anyway, I hope this interests someone. Can anyone tell me anything about the kind of conlangers who are interested in mainstream conlangs ? It doesn't seem to me like many conlangers are. People interested in mainstream conlangs seem to be fans and a certain minority of conlangers, a minority of that being conlangers willing and able to decipher and sufficient present a deciphered conlang or conscript.
From my experience deciphering historic mainstream conlangs and conscripts and their proto- equivalent ( not quite but almost ) and reading the works of others, I would say that my favorite of all are Edgar Rice Burrough's proto-conlangs because each has its own unique flavor and his conscript and proto-conscript also excelled others, like Tolkeins' or Klingon. Mainstream conscripts are sorely neglected, as grammatology is neglected in Linguistics throughout time. Though they're not real conlangs ( just words ), their sounds are carefully planned to reflect their character. Tolkein also is notable for making many languages, but I find his all more similar to eachother and Indo-European-centric. He made no alien languages like Burroughs did. Burroughs did alien languages and human languages of a great variety. I don't find the makers of mainstream conlangs/conscripts and proto-conlangs/conscripts to be the most talent conlangers but rather fortunate amateur conlangers. This is unfortunate because mainstream really showcases the craft and is a good public reference point.
Where's the best forum now-a-days to be picked up by movie-makers as a professional conlanger ? I'm very busy and couldn't do it but am just curious. There should be a special forum or sub-forum just for movie- and TV- makers to request applications and resumes for conlanging jobs or volunteer positions. Does such exist ?