(EN) Preserver of Nearly Extinct Languages

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.''