Uploaded April 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
A look at the Thai script, which is derived from the Davanagari system. What 'F.I.Sn.' after Peter A. Lanyon-Orgill's name stands for is not known. It is given as 'F.I.Sin.' on the front of the author's 'Dictionary of the Mailu Language', where also it is stated that his Ph.D. is from Vienna. The sin, ha ha, of Lanyon-Orgill, described as 'a polyglot and possibly insane Cornishman' who went bankrupt in 1974, was apparently that he was a charlatan in the field of linguistics.
One account (a monograph by R. Clark) of Lanyon-Orgill, who said he had an ancestor who sailed with Captain Cook, reads in part as follows: 'The career of Lanyon-Orgill (1924–2002) provides an illustration of an institutional outsider who nevertheless in the mid-20th century made his name quite well known among Pacific-area linguists through a combination of derivative publication and fictive enhancement, both of his scholarly persona and of the data he presented. His changing reputation and his significance to Pacific linguistics have been subject to some discussion, including the exposure, in the 1980s, of his falsification of alleged 18th-century manuscripts, and the realisation that fraudulent elements were present in his work from the beginning. He never completed his university degree, and earned a living as a schoolmaster while contributing research on Oceanic and Papuan linguistics to mainstream journals, editing his own journal, and publishing a number of monographs that are still in use. That his name has not vanished from the record is explained in part because some of his work (particularly a few dictionaries) has been found by experience to be sound and has not been superseded and in part because persons outside the Pacific-linguistics sphere have taken certain of his impostures in good faith and used them to support non-linguistic conclusions.'
Another account, referring to Clark's monograph, reads: 'Lanyon-Orgill’s confabulations about his life were of a piece with his confections of vocabularies and the fictive persons who appeared in his works, as Ross Clark showed. Distressed wood in fake antiques was his analogy for the way that Lanyon-Orgill modified words from existing word-lists. Lanyon-Orgill even made up a fake Hawaiian word-list which contains words for birds such as swallows, introduced to Hawaii long after the word-list was supposed to have been collected. Exposing such forgeries isn’t just an antiquarian hobby; it saves other people time, labour and groundless enthusiasm.'
A third account: 'Lanyon-Orgill made himself a place in every bibliography of Pacific linguistics without, it could be argued, ever making any original contribution to the field. At one extreme his publishing activities verged on fraud and plagiarism, but from another point of view he made available work which otherwise might have languished unknown in manuscript form. Throughout it all, in parallel with his real life as a schoolmaster, he constructed an apparently imaginary scholarly career, complete with field research, advanced degrees, and learned colleagues, all largely of his own invention.'
A look at the Thai script, which is derived from the Davanagari system. What 'F.I.Sn.' after Peter A. Lanyon-Orgill's name stands for is not known. It is given as 'F.I.Sin.' on the front of the author's 'Dictionary of the Mailu Language', where also it is stated that his Ph.D. is from Vienna. The sin, ha ha, of Lanyon-Orgill, described as 'a polyglot and possibly insane Cornishman' who went bankrupt in 1974, was apparently that he was a charlatan in the field of linguistics.
One account (a monograph by R. Clark) of Lanyon-Orgill, who said he had an ancestor who sailed with Captain Cook, reads in part as follows: 'The career of Lanyon-Orgill (1924–2002) provides an illustration of an institutional outsider who nevertheless in the mid-20th century made his name quite well known among Pacific-area linguists through a combination of derivative publication and fictive enhancement, both of his scholarly persona and of the data he presented. His changing reputation and his significance to Pacific linguistics have been subject to some discussion, including the exposure, in the 1980s, of his falsification of alleged 18th-century manuscripts, and the realisation that fraudulent elements were present in his work from the beginning. He never completed his university degree, and earned a living as a schoolmaster while contributing research on Oceanic and Papuan linguistics to mainstream journals, editing his own journal, and publishing a number of monographs that are still in use. That his name has not vanished from the record is explained in part because some of his work (particularly a few dictionaries) has been found by experience to be sound and has not been superseded and in part because persons outside the Pacific-linguistics sphere have taken certain of his impostures in good faith and used them to support non-linguistic conclusions.'
Another account, referring to Clark's monograph, reads: 'Lanyon-Orgill’s confabulations about his life were of a piece with his confections of vocabularies and the fictive persons who appeared in his works, as Ross Clark showed. Distressed wood in fake antiques was his analogy for the way that Lanyon-Orgill modified words from existing word-lists. Lanyon-Orgill even made up a fake Hawaiian word-list which contains words for birds such as swallows, introduced to Hawaii long after the word-list was supposed to have been collected. Exposing such forgeries isn’t just an antiquarian hobby; it saves other people time, labour and groundless enthusiasm.'
A third account: 'Lanyon-Orgill made himself a place in every bibliography of Pacific linguistics without, it could be argued, ever making any original contribution to the field. At one extreme his publishing activities verged on fraud and plagiarism, but from another point of view he made available work which otherwise might have languished unknown in manuscript form. Throughout it all, in parallel with his real life as a schoolmaster, he constructed an apparently imaginary scholarly career, complete with field research, advanced degrees, and learned colleagues, all largely of his own invention.'
