Bill Bright

[Kira Hall]

Dear all,

I thought that many of you would want to know that one of our great 
sociolinguists, Bill Bright, passed away over the weekend.   We are all 
very sad here at the University of Colorado, where he has been an 
adjunct professor for many years and a friend and mentor to so many of 
us (and the husband of one of our faculty members, Lise Menn).  We will 
miss him dearly.

Attached is today's obituary from the LA Times.  Please accept my 
apologies for any cross-postings.

Kira


************
OBITUARIES

William O. Bright, 78; UCLA Linguist Worked to Preserve a Tribal 
Language

 From Times Staff Reports

October 18, 2006

William O. Bright, a linguist who studied Native American tongues and 
worked to preserve the language of California's Karuk tribe, died 
Sunday of a brain tumor at a hospice near his home in Boulder, Colo. He 
was 78.

Bright was among the first professors of linguistics at UCLA, where he 
taught for 29 years, retiring in 1988. For 21 years, through 1987, he 
was editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of 
America.  He wrote more than 200 books, articles and reviews, including 
several dictionaries of Native American languages that were on the 
brink of disappearing and books on the origin of place names in 
California and elsewhere.

His work preserving the Karuk language, begun at age 21, ultimately led 
the tribe to make Bright its first honorary member in the days before 
his death.  "He had an appreciation of the larger problems we were 
facing, and he used his talents not just for his own benefit but for 
our benefit as well," said Susan Gehr, Karuk Language Program director, 
who was authorized to speak for the tribe.  "When Karuks felt 
emboldened to revitalize our language and culture," she said, "he 
actively supported us by visiting many times to do workshops and 
consult with Karuk individuals on anything related to the Karuk 
language that we wished."

William Oliver Bright was born Aug. 13, 1928, in Oxnard. His mother was 
a homemaker, and his father was a butcher who turned to chicken 
farming.  Bright entered UC Berkeley and was taking summer courses in 
Mexico City when he became interested in the Aztec language.  He 
graduated with a bachelor's degree in linguistics in 1949.

Drafted by the Army in 1952, Bright was assigned to a military 
intelligence unit in Germany.  After returning to Berkeley for a 
doctoral dissertation on the Karuk, he taught in India and at the State 
Department's Foreign Service Institute before joining the faculty at 
UCLA in 1959.  Bright worked in several areas of linguistics, including 
sociolinguistics, which examines language in a social context.

Twice widowed and twice divorced, he is survived by his fifth wife, 
University of Colorado linguistics professor Lise Menn; a daughter, 
Santa Cruz erotica writer and essayist Susie Bright;  granddaughter 
Aretha Bright; and stepsons Stephen Menn, a philosophy professor at 
McGill University in Montreal, and Joseph Menn, a staff writer at the 
Los Angeles Times.

In lieu of flowers, Lise Menn requested donations to fund the newly 
created Bill Bright Award for research, in care of the Endangered 
Language Fund, 300 George St., Suite 900, New Haven, CT 06511, or to 
the American Civil Liberties Union.  Memorial services are to be held 
at the University of Colorado early next month and at the January 
meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Anaheim.



**********
Kira Hall, Associate Professor
Director, Program in Culture, Language and Social Practice (CLASP)
Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology
Campus Box 295
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO  80309-0295
Phone: 303-492-2912
Fax: 303-492-4416
Web: www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/kira_hall
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