Kenneth L. Hale

Kenneth Locke Hale (August 15, 1934 – October 8, 2001) was a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied the syntax, lexicon and phonology of a huge variety of unstudied and often endangered languages -- especially indigenous languages of North America, Central America and Australia. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo, Tohono O'odham, Warlpiri, and Ulwa, among many others.

Hale was born in Evanston, Illinois. When he was six his family moved to a ranch near Canelo in southern Arizona. He was a student at the University of Arizona from 1952 and obtained his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington in 1959 (thesis "A Papago grammar"). He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1961-63 and at the University of Arizona, Tucson in 1963-66. From 1967 he held a sequence of appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 1999.

Hale took care to educate native speakers in linguistics so that native speakers could participate in the study of that language. Among his students are the Tohono O'odham linguist Ofelia Zepeda, the Hopi linguist LaVerne Masayesva Jeanne, and the Navajo linguists Paul Platero and Ellavina Tsosie Perkins. Hale taught every summer in the Navajo Language Academy summer school, even in 2001 during his final illness.

Among his major contributions to linguistic theory was the hypothesis that certain languages were non-configurational, lacking the phrase structure characteristic of such languages as English. Non-configurational languages, according to Hale, display a set of properties that cluster together, including free word order, unpronounced pronouns and the ability to disperse semantically related words across a sentence. Much of his research in the last two decades of the twentieth century was devoted to the development of syntactic models that could explain why these properties cluster. Hale's ideas initiated an important research program, still pursued by many contemporary linguists.

Hale championed the importance of under-studied minority languages in linguistic study, stating that a variety of linguistic phenomena would never have been discovered if only the major world languages had been studied. He argued that any language, whether it has a hundred million native speakers or only ten, is equally likely to yield linguistic insight. Hale was also known as a champion of the speakers of minority languages, and not just of their languages, for which his MIT colleague Noam Chomsky called him "a voice for the voiceless".

Hale was also known as a polyglot who retained the ability to learn new languages with extraordinary rapidity and perfection throughout his life. As a child he learned English, Spanish, and Tohono O'odham. He learned Jemez and Hopi from his highschool roommates and Navajo from his roommate at the University of Arizona.He became so fluent in Warlpiri that he raised his sons Ezra and Caleb to speak Warlpiri after his return from Australia to the United States. Ezra delivered his eulogy for his father in Warlpiri.

Hale was a beloved teacher who introduced many advanced students to the techniques of fieldwork and linguistic analysis, and who conveyed his love of language to all who met him.

External links

* [http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/events/tributes/hale/index.html Ken Hale tribute (by his colleagues and others at MIT)]
* [http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/aust/hale/memoriam.html In Memoriam Ken Hale 1934-2001]

References

* "Bibliography of Ken Hale and Australian languages", by David Nash in Jane Simpson, David Nash, et al, eds, Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages, Pacific Linguistics 2001. ISBN 0-85883-524-X "(contains a complete listing of all Ken Hale’s work relating to Australia)"