A more recent explanation comes from William Bright, who wrote that the name is "probably derived from Río Canadiano", a Spanish spelling of the Caddo word káyántinu, which was the Caddos' name for the nearby Red River.
Holt subsequently attended the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA (where his graduate advisor was William Bright), receiving from the last of these four degrees in Linguistics (B.A. 1972, M.A. 1973, C.Phil. 1975, and Ph.D. 1986).
Bright was also known for his research on the native American languages Nahuatl, Kaqchikel, Luiseño, Ute, Wishram, and Yurok, and the South Asian languages Lushai, Kannada, Tamil, and Tulu.
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In his 1500 California Place Names (1998), William Bright writes that the name is Spanish for "where the chual grows," chual being Mexican Spanish for pigweed or goosefoot, and derived ultimately from Nahuatl tzoalli.
The published record of Karuk oral literature is an unusually rich one, thanks to the efforts of Alfred L. Kroeber, John Peabody Harrington, William Bright, and others.