Donald Laycock

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Dr. Donald 'Don' Laycock was a graduate of University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia and later worked as a researcher at the University of Adelaide in Anthropology. He undertook his PhD at the Australian National University in linguistics and became a world authority of the languages of Papua New Guinea.

He was described by his fellow authors of Skeptical (David Vernon, Dr Colin Groves and Simon Brown) as a 20th Century 'Renaissance Man' as his interests were wide ranging from Melanesian languages, to channeling, Tarot cards and bawdy songs.

He was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Vice President of the Australian Linguistic Society and a member of MENSA. A keen member of the Australian Skeptics he entertained many people at Skeptic's conventions with his demonstrations of glossolalia and going into trances.

He died after a short illness in Canberra on 28 December 1988.

After his death, his meticulous work on the Enochian 'language' (which was allegedly channelled to an associate of the Elizabethan mystic John Dee) was turned by a colleague into one of the very few classics of skeptical linguistics. He published numerous papers on linguistics.

[edit] Bibliography

• Skeptical Eds. Don Laycock, David Vernon, Colin Groves, Simon Brown, Canberra Skeptics, 1989, ISBN 0-7316-5794-2
• The World's Best Dirty Songs, Don Laycock, Angus & Robertson, North Ryde, 1987, ISBN 0-207-15408-2
• The Best Bawdry, Don Laycock, Angus & Robetson, Sydney, 1982
• The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language as Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley, Donald Laycock, London: Askin Publishers. 1978
• Speak Norfuk Today, Alice Buffet, Don Laycock, Norfolk Island, 1988
• A dictionary of Buin, a language of Bougainville, Donald C. Laycock, edited by Masayuki Onishi (Pacific Linguistics 537, 2003)--published posthumously

[edit] References

The Skeptic, Vol 19, No 1, p7

The Second Coming, Barry Williams, Australian Skeptics, Sydney, 1990

Aspects of meaning in fieldwork, in Tom Dutton, Malcolm Ross and Darrell Tryon (eds), The language game: Papers in memory of Don C. Laycock, Pacific Linguistics, C 110, 22 pp., Canberra: ANU, 1993