Languages This article is more than 22 years oldObituaryKenneth Hale
This article is more than 22 years oldThe master of more than 50 languages, he fought to protect vanishing native traditionsThe memorial service for Kenneth Hale, who has died of cancer aged 67, featured contributions in English, Hebrew, three native American languages - Hopi, Navajo and Wampanoag - and Warlpiri, an Australian aboriginal language.
As professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1967, Hale was the only man in the world who understood them all. He coupled this facility with a theoretical imagination that had a major impact on the shape of linguistic studies over 25 years. In a tribute, Noam Chomsky referred to him as "a voice for the voiceless."
As a young man in Canelo, Arizona, the unlikely worlds of exotic languages and the American southwest blended in Hale. He was, for example, bull-riding champion of the University of Arizona rodeo, and discovered his facility for language as a 14-year-old, when he acquired Navajo with the ease young children usually display in acquiring their native language. This ability, which every human being has but which appears to shut off at puberty, never closed down in Hale. He developed a speaking knowledge of more than 50 languages, though claimed he could only "talk" in three - English, Spanish and Warlpiri.
Those to whom he spoke in one of the other 47 would demur. He told a New York Times interviewer in 1997 that, when he discovered he knew Navajo, he would "go out every day and sit on a rock and talk Navajo to myself". He was 15 at the time and attending Verde Valley School, where he shared rooms with a Hopi student, and then with a Jemez speaker. Hale studied Spanish and French in class, and Hopi and Jemez after the bell had rung. Because the latter two languages had no writing system, he devised his own. He ignored his teacher's objections to him learning so many languages at once, maintaining that the more languages he studied, the faster he learned each one. By the time he left high school, he had added Polish and Tohono O'odham (Papago) to his list.
At MIT, Hale's work on non-configurational languages set an agenda that is still being explored. So, too, did his work on lexical argument structure, an interest which began with his involvement in the Warlpiri dictionary project at MIT's centre for cognitive science in 1979. This work on dictionaries, to preserve endangered languages, also involved work on Ulwa and Miskitu (two Misumalpan languages native to Nicaragua).
The majority of Hale's theoretical contributions are embodied in more than 130 scholarly articles. Two months before his death, he managed to finish the only book he ever wrote, A Prolegomena To A Theory of Lexical Argument Structure. He also co-authored a recommendation that formed the foundation of bilingual education in Australia's Northern Territory.
Part of the reason for the importance of such work to him was that it had a moral dimension. Hale was driven to help those whose resources left them helpless. For 30 years, he was active in the anti-war organisation, Resist.
A number of honours fell upon Hale's shoulders, uncomfortably so because he was a modest man. In 1989, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, the following year, to the National Academy of Sciences. He was president of the Linguistic Society of America (1994-95). In 1981, he was appointed Ferrari P Ward professor of linguistics at MIT, after being unanimously recommended by his colleagues in an informal poll.
He is survived by his wife Sara, and four sons.
Kenneth Lock Hale, linguist, born August 15 1934; died October 8 2001
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