Cecil H. Brown
{{Short description|American linguist}}
{{Infobox academic
| name = Cecil H. Brown
| image =
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| birth_name = Cecil Hooper Brown II
| birth_date = 1944
| birth_place = United States
| occupation = Linguist, anthropologist
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| alma_mater = Tulane University
| influences =
| workplaces = Northern Illinois University
| main_interests = Mayan languages
| notable_works =
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Cecil H. Brown (born 1944) is an American linguist and anthropologist. He is a distinguished research professor emeritus of anthropology at Northern Illinois University. His work relates to comparative linguistics and ethnobiology.
Education
Brown attended Tulane University for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, receiving a B.A. in 1966 and PhD in 1971.{{cite journal |last1=Brown |first1=Cecil H. |title=Mode of Subsistence and Folk Biological Taxonomy [and Comments and Reply] |journal=Current Anthropology |date=Feb 1985 |volume=26 |issue=1 |pages=43–64 |doi=10.1086/203224 |jstor=2742995 |s2cid=86054416 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2742995 |access-date=10 December 2022}} As an undergraduate, he studied British social anthropology abroad for one year. He then became interested in the work of Stephen A. Tyler and the new field of cognitive anthropology. Brown conducted fieldwork with the Huastec people, a Mayan group of northern Veracruz, Mexico. He investigated cognitive anthropology of kinship, color, disease, plants, and animals. In 1982, he attended his first ethnobiology meeting in Colombia.{{cite web |title=Cecil Brown |url=https://ethnobiology.org/audio/cecil-brown |website=Society of Ethnobiology |access-date=8 December 2022}}
Career
In 1998, Brown became a distinguished research professor.{{cite web |title=Past Presidential Research, Scholarship and Artistry Professors |url=https://www.niu.edu/president/professorships/research/past-recipients.shtml |website=Northern Illinois University |access-date=8 December 2022}} He was a visiting scientist in the linguistics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 2001.{{cite web |title=Cecil H. Brown |url=http://www3.niu.edu:80/anthro/people/faculty/brown.htm |website=Department of Anthropology |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081205090904/http://www3.niu.edu:80/anthro/people/faculty/brown.htm |archive-date=5 December 2008}} After 32 years of teaching anthropology and linguistics, Brown retired from teaching in 2002.{{cite book |last1=Tidemann |first1=Sonia |last2=Gosler |first2=Andrew |title=Ethno-ornithology: Birds, Indigenous Peoples, Culture and Society |date=2010 |publisher=Earthscan |isbn=978-1-84407-783-0}} In 2015, Brown was awarded the Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award from the Society of Ethnobiology.{{cite web |title=Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award |url=https://ethnobiology.org/awards/distinguished-ethnobiologist-award |website=Society of Ethnobiology |access-date=13 December 2022}}
Brown is co-founder of the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP).{{cite book |last1=Robbeets |first1=Martine |last2=Savelyev |first2=Alexander |title=The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages |date=2020 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-880462-8}}
Selected publications
- Brown, Cecil H. Wittgensteinian linguistics. De Gruyter Mouton, 2012.
- Brown, Cecil H. Lexical acculturation in Native American languages. Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Brown, Cecil H. Language and Living Things. Rutgers University Press, 1984.
- Brown II, Cecil Hooper. An ordinary language approach to transformational grammar and to formal semantic analysis of Huastec terminological systems. Tulane University, 1971.
References
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Category:Linguists from the United States
Category:Tulane University alumni
Category:Northern Illinois University faculty
Category:Linguists of Mesoamerican languages
Category:American Mesoamericanists
Category:20th-century Mesoamericanists
Category:21st-century Mesoamericanists