Will and Rick begin building a pulley system to make use of mechanical advantage, and Cha-Ka goes to recruit Ta and Sa in the operation.
I kept thinking how daring to have the show feature a language the kids could not speak, but the talented actors who played Cha-ka, Ta and Sa were able to tell the story!
[…] One thing is fairly certain, however: it was [Joe] Taritero [NBC's Vice President of Children's Programming at the time] who set in motion the creation of "Pakuni," the primitive language spoken by the Cha-Ka, Ta and Sa, the series' three Cenozoic ape-man characters.
Bowing to what he termed "teacher pressure," Taritero took the new-language angle a step farther, promoting Pakuni as a potential educational tool.
"The idea of creating a language that could be learned by children was an exciting challenge," remembered Dr. Fromkin, "Not just the old 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' sort of thing."
First off, Fromkin established a common ground between the new language and existing ones: sounds (vowels, consonants) and syntax (rules for combining words, like "subject-verb- object").