Bill Bright's Memorial Service

[Kira Hall]

(Please accept my apologies for multiple postings)

Dear all,

Many of you have contacted me regarding the date and time of the 
memorial service for Bill Bright, who recently passed away.   I wanted 
to send out information about the service in case some of you are 
interested in attending, particularly if you happen to be in the 
Colorado area.  The memorial service will be held on the University of 
Colorado at Boulder campus, Boulder, Colorado, on Sunday, November 5, 
from 1-3 pm, in Room 235 of the UMC, University Memorial Center.  
(There is also a memorial service planned for this year's LSA, but I 
don't yet have the information on that.)

Below I have attached the obituary from the New York Times, which 
appeared on Tuesday.  The previous email I sent included an obituary 
from the LA Times;  you'll see that this one is a bit more focused on 
Bill's sociolinguistic contributions.

The service promises to be something Bill would have liked, bringing 
together family, friends, faculty, graduate students, musicians he has 
befriended over the years, and several members of the Karuk tribe.

Best to all,

Kira



***************
New York Times
October 23, 2006


William Bright, 78, Expert in Indigenous Languages, Is Dead
By MARGALIT FOX

William Bright, an internationally renowned linguist who spent more 
than half a century inventorying the vanishing riches of the indigenous 
languages of the United States, died on Oct. 15 in Louisville, Colo. He 
was 78 and lived in Boulder, Colo.

The cause was a brain tumor, said his daughter, Susie Bright, the 
well-known writer of erotica.

At his death, Mr. Bright was professor adjoint of linguistics at the 
University of Colorado, Boulder. He was also emeritus professor of 
linguistics and anthropology at the University of California, Los 
Angeles, where he taught from 1959 to 1988.

An authority on the native languages and cultures of California, Mr. 
Bright was known in particular for his work on Karuk (also spelled 
Karok), an American Indian language from the northwest part of the 
state. Shortly before his death, in recognition of his efforts to 
document and preserve the language, he was made an honorary member of 
the Karuk tribe, the first outsider to be so honored.

His books include “American Indian Linguistics and Literature” (Mouton, 
1984); “A Coyote Reader” (University of California, 1993); “1,500 
California Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning” (University of 
California, 1998); and “Native American Placenames of the United 
States” (University of Oklahoma, 2004).

Mr. Bright’s approach to the study of language was one seldom seen 
nowadays. With the ascendance of Noam Chomsky in the late 1950’s, 
linguistics shifted its focus from documenting language as an artifact 
of human culture to analyzing it as a window onto human cognition.

But to Mr. Bright, language was inseparable from its cultural context, 
which might include songs, poetry, stories and everyday conversation. 
And so, lugging unwieldy recording devices, he continued to make forays 
into traditional communities around the world, sitting down with native 
speakers and eliciting words, phrases and sentences.

Among the languages on which he worked were Nahuatl, an Aztec language 
of Mexico; Cakchiquel, of Guatemala; Luiseño, Ute, Wishram and Yurok, 
languages of the Western United States; and Lushai, Kannada, Tamil and 
Tulu, languages of the Indian subcontinent.

William Oliver Bright was born on Aug. 13, 1928, in Oxnard, Calif. He 
received a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of 
California, Berkeley, in 1949. After a stint in Army intelligence, he 
earned a doctorate in linguistics from Berkeley in 1955.

He began his fieldwork among the Karuk in 1949. At the time, their 
language was a tattered remnant of its former splendor, spoken by just 
a handful of elders. Since encounters with Europeans had rarely ended 
well for the Karuk, the community had little reason to welcome an 
outsider.

But Bill Bright was deferential, curious and, at 21, scarcely more than 
a boy. He was also visibly homesick. The Karuk grandmothers took him 
in, baking him cookies and cakes and sharing their language. They named 
him Uhyanapatanvaanich, “little word-asker.”

In 1957, Mr. Bright published “The Karok Language” (University of 
California), a detailed description of the language and its structure. 
Last year, the tribe published a Karuk dictionary, compiled by Mr. 
Bright and Susan Gehr. Today, Karuk children learn the language in 
tribal schools.

Mr. Bright was divorced twice and widowed twice. From his first 
marriage, he is survived by his daughter, Susannah (known as Susie), of 
Santa Cruz, Calif. Also surviving are his wife, Lise Menn, a professor 
of linguistics at the University of Colorado; two stepsons, Stephen 
Menn of Montreal and Joseph Menn of Los Angeles; one grandchild; and 
two step-grandchildren.

His other books include “The World’s Writing Systems” (Oxford 
University, 1996), which he edited with Peter T. Daniels; and the 
International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Oxford University, 1992), of 
which he was editor in chief. From 1966 to 1987, Mr. Bright was the 
editor of Language, the field’s flagship journal.

The professor was also a meticulous reader of all his daughter’s 
manuscripts. He displayed the finished products — among them “Susie 
Bright’s Sexual State of the Union” (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and 
“Mommy’s Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn and Cherry Pie” 
(Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003) — proudly on his shelves at home.




**********
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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