White Plains, March 23
Raymond D. Courtright, a manufacturer and self-taught linguist, died last night at an upstate hospital. He was 65 years old.
Mr. Courtright, who was the president of the New York subsidiary of Bowser, Inc., a Fort Wayne company that manufactures pumps and oil handling equipment, took up the study of languages as a hobby.
He was said to be able to speak 50 languages and dialects with varying degrees of proficiency. One of his linguistic achievements came when he watched a television program on which a scholar offered the public an alphabetic list of ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs.
Mr. Courtright sent in for the scroll, penning his request in the ancient Egyptian characters.
In his letter the phrase "scroll of letters" was depicted by seven groups of characters, including a vulture-like bird, a rectangle with diagonal stripes and a zig-zag that looked like a mountain range.
Mr. Courtright said later that he had worked very hard on his letter, picking up the characters from a number of vocabularies.
In due time he received the scroll and with it a letter, also written in heiroglyphs, prepared by Miss Nora Scott, an Egyptologist. Part of her reply, freely translated, said: "Clearly you have already the writing of Egypt. But here, anyhow, is the scroll.
In addition to his avocational interest in languages, Mr. Courtright spent a good deal of time painting landscapes and carving figures from wood.
He is survived by his widow, the former Leeta Dixon, a son Robert C., two daughters, Mrs. Grace Lynn and Mrs. Constance Willard, and three grandchildren.