Kenneth L. Hale, 67, Preserver of Nearly Extinct Languages
By WOLFGANG SAXON
Published: October 19, 2001
Dr. Kenneth Locke Hale, a master of more than 50 languages and the
keeper of aboriginal tongues in danger of vanishing with their speakers,
died on Oct. 8 at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 67.
The cause was prostate cancer, said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a professor of linguistics.
Dr. Hale's knack for quickly picking up a language and conversing
in dozens of them earned him an international reputation. His
theoretical interests focused on linguistic universals, prompting him to
learn as many disparate languages as possible and investigate laws or
structures they might have in common.
His studies contributed to the continuing quest for a general
theory of the human capacity for language. But he was best known for his
commitment to keep alive the unwritten speech of peoples at risk of
extinction by assimilation or other means.
Dr. Hale learned some of the ancient languages of the American
Indians and the Australian Aborigines, and he saw some of the languages
and their speakers disappear after he had learned them.
Throughout his career he promoted linguistic training for speakers
of languages of indigenous peoples so that they could preserve them and
pass them on to another generation. According to M.I.T., two of his
graduate students, a Hopi and a Navajo, were the first Native Americans
to receive doctorates in linguistics.
''Ken viewed languages as if they were works of art,'' said Dr.
Samuel Jay Keyser, a friend and M.I.T. colleague. ''Every person who
spoke a language was a curator of a masterpiece.''
Another colleague, Dr. Philip Khoury, an M.I.T. dean, said he once
asked Dr. Hale about his ability to speak languages by the dozen. ''The
problem is,'' he quoted Dr. Hale's reply, ''that many of the languages
I've learned are extinct, or close to extinction, and I have no one to
speak them with.''
Kenneth Hale grew up on a ranch in Canelo, Ariz., and attended a
one-room grade school he reached on horseback every morning. Sent on to
school in Sedona, Ariz., he learned Hopi and Jemez from roommates and
figured out how to write languages that had no letters.
''I learned faster by working on more than one language at a
time,'' he recalled later. Since high school, he said, he quickly moved
on to Navajo, O'odam, Papago, Pachuco, Polish and whatever came along,
including eight Australian Aboriginal languages.
As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona he studied
anthropology and Native American languages. He also rode rodeo bulls,
won the university's bull-riding event as a senior and kept the buckle
of his trophy belt for the rest of his life.
After graduating in 1955, he received a master's degree in 1956 and
a doctorate in 1958 in linguistics at Indiana University. He researched
Australian Aboriginal languages on a National Science Foundation grant
for three years and worked at the University of Illinois and the
University of Arizona before moving to M.I.T. in 1967.
He retired from teaching in 1999.
Over the years he trained Walpiri-speaking teachers in Central
Australia and taught linguistics in Arizona for the Navajo Language
Academy. He was involved in a language revitalization project for the
Wampanoag tribe of New England and for the last 15 years visited the
Caribbean coast of Nicaragua to teach linguists in four indigenous
languages.
He was the editor most recently, with Dr. Leanne Hinton, of ''The
Green Book of Language Revitalization,'' published this year. Another
book he recently completed with Dr. Keyser, ''Prolegomena to a Theory of
Argument Structure,'' is to be published by M.I.T. Press.
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1990.
Dr. Hale is survived by his wife of 46 years, Sara Whitaker Hale;
four sons, Whitaker, of Arlington, Mass., Ian, of Tucson, Caleb, of
Atlanta, and Ezra, of Lexington; and a brother, Stephen F., of Tucson.
Dr. Hale was modest about his polyglot accomplishment. ''It's more
like a musical talent than anything else,'' he told The New York Times
in 1997. ''When I found out I could speak Navajo at the age of 12, I
used to go out every day and sit on a rock and talk Navajo to myself,''
he recalled.
He said he could never learn a language in a classroom, but only
one on one with a person. He said he would start with parts of the body,
common animals and objects, learn nouns, pick up sound systems and
write it all down.
''If it's not a written language, like Nggoth, which is spoken in
Australia,'' he said, ''I make up how to write it. I can learn that in
one or two hours.
''Then I start making complex sentences because the complex
sentences are more regular than the simple ones. Then pretty soon I can
name anything in the world.''
