[lbo-talk] Susie Bright's dad dies

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Oct 22 23:49:13 PDT 2006


[He's identified as her dad in the last paragraph in a way that's really kind of sweet for the New York Times]

[BTW, he's also the one who recently tracked down the original citation of Chris Doss's favorite saying, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy:" http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Linguistics/armynavy.html]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/books/23bright.html

The 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. Brights approach to the study of language was one seldom seen

nowadays. With the ascendance of Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s,

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 bachelors 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 Worlds 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 fields flagship journal.

The professor was also a meticulous reader of all his daughter's

manuscripts. He displayed the finished products -- among them Susie

Brights Sexual State of the Union (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and Mommys

Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn and Cherry Pie (Thunders Mouth

Press, 2003) -- proudly on his shelves at home.



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