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  • William Oliver Bright
  • Jane Hill

William O. ‘Bill’ Bright, polymathic Americanist, Indologist, typographer, toponomist, poet, teacher, editor (of this journal, for twenty-two years, and of two others), president of the Linguistic Society of America (in 1989), died on Sunday, October 15, 2006. His New York Times obituary located his death in Louisville, Colorado, the site of the hospice where he spent his final hours, but Bill was really at the end a Boulder person, with roots sunk so wide and deep in the community where he had lived since 1988 with his wife, Professor Lise Menn of the University of Colorado, that the Takacs String Quartet, the eminent quartet-in-residence of the University, played Brahms in his living room for him when he proved too weak to attend their last concert before his death. The January 2007 Boulder Bach Festival concerts were dedicated to Bill’s memory.1

1. Overview

Bill was born August 13, 1928, in Oxnard, California, ‘a small town facing the Pacific’ (Bright 1979c) like the birthplace of his poet-hero Pablo Neruda. Overheard exchanges between his father, a butcher who had learned the local Spanish, and Spanish-speaking customers (the majority in the Oxnard of that day) led to Bill’s life-long interest in Spanish and a familiarity with rustic californio usage that served him well when his scholarly interests turned to Spanish loans in the indigenous languages of California and the West. His mother was an enthusiastic gardener who included among her favorite flowers ‘Sweet William’ (Dianthus barbatus), which she and her eponymous son would jokingly exchange.

Even as a teenager Bill was fascinated by language. He studied Latin (‘because of my adviser’s erroneous belief that Latin was prerequisite for the premedical curriculum that I hoped to enter in college’ (Bright 1980:121)) and, becoming an opera fan, worked on Italian, French, and German—all of which show up in his correspondence by his freshman year in college. Upon his graduation from Oxnard High School in 1945 he was awarded a full scholarship to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Perfecting his Spanish during a summer school stint at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico City in 1947, Bill discovered Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Back in Berkeley, he explored colonial grammars of Nahuatl (while he knew their work well, he never abandoned his structuralist’s disdain for the colonial grammarians, whom he saw as slavish followers of the tradition of Latin grammar), along with Benjamin Whorf’s (1946) sketch of Milpa Alta Nahuatl. Hoping to better understand Whorf’s esoteric linguistic vocabulary, Bill enrolled in Murray B. Emeneau’s course in linguistics. In 1947 he changed his major from pre-med to Spanish, but, finding it impossible to work within a linguistic framework in the Spanish department, he received permission to design his own major in linguistics. He received Berkeley’s first A.B. in that discipline in 1949 (the Department itself was not chartered until 1953).

Emeneau and Mary Haas sent Bill, with his brand-new bachelor’s degree, to the field to work on Karuk (at that time called ‘Karok’), as the very first field worker [End Page 628] sponsored by what later became the Survey of California Indian Languages. Bill later reflected that, ‘In retrospect, I am astounded that anyone as green as I was could have been sent on such a mission’ (Bright 1980:122). Yet Karuk turned out to be a providential choice: an extremely interesting language, and a highly congenial community. In 1949 the language had about one hundred elderly speakers, many of them women who were both mindfully immersed in Karuk language and culture and delighted to stuff a very skinny young graduate student with the best baked goods their kitchens could produce. They nicknamed him Uhyanapatánvaanich ‘Little Word-Asker’, which must have been in the affectionate reading of the diminutive, since Bill was 6 feet 2 inches tall.

The Karok language, published in 1957 as Volume 13 of the University of California Publications in Linguistics, was the first publication from the Survey of California Indian Languages and the first monograph-length work from a graduate of the...

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