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IN MEMORIAM

William Oliver Bright

Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus

UC Los Angeles

1928 - 2006

 

William Oliver Bright, an energetic and longstanding authority on Native American languages, died October 15, 2006 of a brain tumor at the age of 78. Bright was among the first professors of linguistics at UCLA, where he taught for 29 years until his retirement in 1988. For twenty-one years, through 1987, he served as the editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America.

 

The Oxnard native 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.

 

“He was probably the greatest authority in the work on Native American place names,” said Jane Hill, a Regent’s professor at the University of Arizona. His classic work preserving the language of California’s Karuk tribe ultimately led the Karuk to make Bright their first honorary member in the days before his death at a hospice near his home in Boulder, Colorado.

 

Other linguistics said Bright helped keep the focus on data-driven research during a period of intramural warfare sparked by the ideas of MIT linguist Noam Chomsky.

 

After earning undergraduate and doctoral degrees at UC Berkeley, he taught in India and at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute before joining the faculty at UCLA. While at UCLA, he encouraged scholars and writers as diverse as Deborah Tannen, author of bestseller “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,” and Carlos Castaneda.

 

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

 

Tommy Johnson