A
Tribute by Bill Labov
I
am writing at some distance to express my profound sadness at the passing
of Bill Bright, and my deep regret that I could not be with you at this
meeting to remember and recognize his contribution to our work and our lives.
My friendship with Bill goes back to the earliest days of sociolinguistics,
at the meeting at Lake Arrowhead in 1962 which brought together the broad
group of scholars who created this way of looking at language. Since then,
whenever our paths have crossed, I experienced the unique sense of warmth,
generosity and geniality that was his trademark. There are at least three
generations of linguists who will remember Bill as a personality from such
first hand experience. Beyond that point, I believe that there will be quite
a few generations who will draw something similar from the technical studies
of language variation that he has left with us.
Though
Bill worked on many languages, from Kanada and Tamil to Karok and Cupeño,
I turn most often to his papers on Karok and in particular to his very first
published paper, Linguistic Innovations in Karok, published in IJAL in 1952.
I was thinking of this paper when I sat in on a recent course on the theory
of loan word adaptation, and realized how much further the field could advance
if the input data resembled his treatment of Karok borrowings. He
reported more than the words. His accounts placed these innovations in both
the semantic and cultural matrix that is required to understand them. For
example, Bill reported that Karok speakers had adopted páskit from
English basket presumably because Karok had ‘bowl-basket', ‘storage
basket' and ‘burden-basket' but no generic term. Though basket technology
was obviously well developed among the Karok, one might have claimed that
the English loan responded to an unfilled need for generality. But before
Bill adopted this theory, his deep sense of reality and truly scientific
skepticism intervened. He wrote
‘To
be sure, there is a reasonable doubt that even the modern Karok speaker
feels a need for such a generic term. My informants may have used it with
me simply to be accommodating to a white man.'
We
hear in this the modest voice of a young man with a deep affection for both
language and the speakers of it, but who was also in love with reality,
too much so to allow himself to be detached from it by the first passing
idea. As far as I know, Bill Bright never lost that quality over the years
and we miss him for it. Readers of the future have much to learn from his
modesty, his scholarship, and his relentless drive to understand the world
around him.
Bill
Labov
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