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