Cecil H. Brown (born 1944) is an American linguist and anthropologist. He is a distinguished research professor emeritus of anthropology at

Northern Illinois University Northern Illinois University (NIU) is a public research university in DeKalb, Illinois, United States. It was founded as "Northern Illinois State Normal School" in 1895 by Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld, initially to provide the state with c ...

. His work relates to comparative linguistics and ethnobiology.

Early Life

Brown grew up in Jackson, Tennessee. Both his father and grandfather were physicians. As a young person, Brown was not interested in medicine, but knew he would go on to get a PhD.

Education

Brown attended

Tulane University The Tulane University of Louisiana (commonly referred to as Tulane University) is a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Founded as the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834 by a cohort of medical doctors, it b ...

for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, receiving a B.A. in 1966 and PhD in 1971. 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 The Huastec or Téenek (contraction of ''Te' Inik'', "people from here"; also known as Huaxtec, Wastek or Huastecos) are an Indigenous people of Mexico, living in the La Huasteca region including the Mexican state, states of Hidalgo (Mexico), Hid ...

, a Mayan group of northern

Veracruz Veracruz, formally Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave, is one of the 31 states which, along with Mexico City, comprise the 32 Political divisions of Mexico, Federal Entit ...

, Mexico. He investigated cognitive anthropology of kinship, color, disease, plants, and animals. In 1982, he attended his first ethnobiology meeting in Colombia.

Career

In 1998, Brown became a distinguished research professor. He was a visiting scientist in the linguistics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 2001. After 32 years of teaching anthropology and linguistics, Brown retired from teaching in 2002. In 2015, Brown was awarded the Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award from the Society of Ethnobiology. Brown is co-founder of the

Automated Similarity Judgment Program The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists f ...

(ASJP).

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

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Cecil H. Living people 1944 births Linguists from the United States Tulane University alumni Northern Illinois University faculty Linguists of Mesoamerican languages Mayanists American Mesoamericanists 20th-century Mesoamericanists 21st-century Mesoamericanists 20th-century American anthropologists 21st-century American anthropologists