Kenneth Locke Hale (August 15, 1934 – October 8, 2001), also known as Ken Hale, was an American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered languages—especially indigenous languages of North America and Australia. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo, O'odham, Warlpiri, and Ulwa. 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. Life Hale was born in Evanston, Illinois. When he was six his family moved to a ranch near Canelo in southern Arizona. He attended the Verde Valley School before Hale said he was "thrown out" for being too distracted by his study of languages, before transferring to Tucson High School. As a young man, Hale was an avid bull and bronc rider. A film clip of Hale being thrown from a bull in the 1952 Tucson Rodeo was used as stock footage and is included in the film Arena. 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 was known as a polyglot who retained the ability to learn new languages with extraordinary rapidity and perfection throughout his life. As a child, in addition to English he learned both Spanish and the native American language Tohono O'odham. He learned Jemez and Hopi from his high school roommates and Navajo from his roommate at the University of Arizona. Hale managed in just one week to write up 750 pages of fieldwork notes on the Marra language alone in 1959. 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. Linguistics 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