X-Nico

2 unusual facts about Donald Laycock


Donald Laycock

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 channelling, Tarot cards and bawdy songs.

After his death, Laycock's 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.


Norfuk dialect

Alice Buffett, a Norfolk Island parliamentarian and Australian-trained linguist, developed a codified grammar and orthography for the language in the 1980s, assisted by Dr Donald Laycock, an Australian National University academic.

Sepik–Ramu languages

The Sepik–Ramu languages are a hypothetical language family linking the Sepik, Ramu, Nor–Pondo (Lower Sepik), Leonhard Schultze (Walio–Papi), and Yuat families, together with the Taiap language isolate, and proposed by Donald Laycock in 1973.


see also