Kenneth L. Hale
Encyclopedia
Kenneth Locke Hale was a linguist
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered language
s—especially indigenous language
s of North America
, Central America
and Australia
. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo
, Tohono O'odham
, Warlpiri
, and Ulwa
, among many others.
, 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.
He was 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 language
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.
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 pronoun
s 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 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, Navajo
linguists Paul Platero
and Ellavina Tsosie Perkins, and Ahtna
linguist, John Smelcer. Hale taught every summer in the Navajo Language Academy
summer school, even in 2001 during his final illness.
In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences
.
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 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.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered language
Endangered language
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....
s—especially indigenous language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s of North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
, Central America
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo
Navajo language
Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
, Tohono O'odham
Tohono O'odham
The Tohono O'odham are a group of Native American people who reside primarily in the Sonoran Desert of the southeastern Arizona and northwest Mexico...
, Warlpiri
Warlpiri language
The Warlpiri language is spoken by about 3000 of the Warlpiri people in Australia's Northern Territory. It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Southwest branch of the Pama–Nyungan family, and is one of the largest aboriginal languages in Australia in terms of number of speakers.-...
, and Ulwa
Misumalpan languages
The Misumalpan languages are a small family of Native American languages spoken by indigenous peoples on the east coast of Nicaragua and nearby areas. The name "Misumalpan" was devised by John Alden Mason and is composed of syllables from the names of the family's three members Miskitu, Sumu and...
, among many others.
Life
Hale was born in EvanstonEvanston, Illinois
Evanston is a suburban municipality in Cook County, Illinois 12 miles north of downtown Chicago, bordering Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, and Wilmette to the north, with an estimated population of 74,360 as of 2003. It is one of the North Shore communities that adjoin Lake Michigan...
, Illinois. When he was six his family moved to a ranch near Canelo
Canelo, Arizona
Canelo is a ghost town in eastern Santa Cruz County, Arizona, between the Canelo Hills and the north end of the Huachuca Mountains. The site lies along Turkey Creek on Arizona State Route 83 between Sonoita and Parker Canyon Lake about 10 miles to the south-southeast in Cochise County.-External...
in southern Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
. He was a student at the University of Arizona
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...
from 1952 and obtained his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington
Indiana University Bloomington
Indiana University Bloomington is a public research university located in Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. IU Bloomington is the flagship campus of the Indiana University system. Being the flagship campus, IU Bloomington is often referred to simply as IU or Indiana...
in 1959 (thesis A Papago grammar). He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
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
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
until his retirement in 1999.
He was known as a polyglot
Polyglot (person)
A polyglot is someone with a high degree of proficiency in several languages. A bilingual person can speak two languages fluently, whereas a trilingual three; above that the term multilingual may be used.-Hyperpolyglot:...
who retained the ability to learn new languages with extraordinary rapidity and perfection throughout his life. As a child he learned English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, and Tohono O'odham. He learned Jemez
Jemez language
Jemez is a Kiowa–Tanoan language spoken by the Jemez Pueblo people in New Mexico. It has no written form, as tribal rules do not allow it.-Demographics:...
and Hopi language
Hopi
The Hopi are a federally recognized tribe of indigenous Native American people, who primarily live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The Hopi area according to the 2000 census has a population of 6,946 people. Their Hopi language is one of the 30 of the Uto-Aztecan language...
from his highschool roommates and Navajo from his roommate at the University of Arizona. He became so fluent in Warlpiri
Warlpiri language
The Warlpiri language is spoken by about 3000 of the Warlpiri people in Australia's Northern Territory. It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Southwest branch of the Pama–Nyungan family, and is one of the largest aboriginal languages in Australia in terms of number of speakers.-...
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.
Among his major contributions to linguistic theory was the hypothesis that certain languages were non-configurational
Non-configurational language
In generative grammar, non-configurational languages are languages in which there is no verb phrase constituent . In configurational languages, the subject of a sentence is outside the VP and the object is inside; in non-configurational languages, since there is no VP constituent, there is no...
, 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
Word order
In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...
, unpronounced pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s 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 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
Ofelia Zepeda
Ofelia Zepeda is a Tohono O'odham poet and intellectual. Zepeda is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and is well known for her efforts in the preservation of her native language and promotion literacy in it. She is also known for her work as a consultant and advocate on...
, the Hopi
Hopi language
Hopi is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, USA, although today some Hopi are monolingual English speakers.The use of the language has gradually declined over the course of the 20th century...
linguist LaVerne Masayesva Jeanne, Navajo
Navajo language
Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
linguists Paul Platero
Paul Platero
Paul Platero is a Navajo linguist. He was a student of the late MIT linguistics professor Ken Hale. Platero earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, with a dissertation on the relative clause in Navajo....
and Ellavina Tsosie Perkins, and Ahtna
Ahtna
The Ahtna are one of the tribes of Athabaskan people in Alaska. The tribe's homeland is located in the Copper River area of southern Alaska, and the name Ahtna derives from the local name for the Copper River...
linguist, John Smelcer. Hale taught every summer in the Navajo Language Academy
Navajo Language Academy
The Navajo Language Academy is a non-profit educational and advocacy organization which focuses on the Navajo language.-Overview:...
summer school, even in 2001 during his final illness.
In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
.
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
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
called him "a voice for the voiceless".
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.