2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

General discussion about learning languages
Finny
Green Belt
Posts: 260
Joined: Sun May 22, 2016 3:01 am
Languages: English...
x 582

2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby Finny » Sun May 22, 2016 3:40 am

Ken Hale is, in my opinion, the most dazzling example of polyglottery I've ever come across, and ever since I came across him 10 years ago (unfortunately he'd passed by then), I've always been eager to learn more about him and his legendary abilities to pick up languages. Here are two long (close to 1h each) videos of him giving a presentation ( "A Estrutura das Línguas Indígenas Brasileiras",) in Petropolis, Brazil, in 2000, a year before he sadly passed away due to prostate cancer. I used to be on the old forums a decade ago, and was thinking about him tonight when I came across this.

Part 1:


Part 2:


The talk, unfortunately, isn't about his language acquisition as far as I can tell (I speak Spanish and spent a bit of time with Portuguese back in the day, so I can generally follow it), but I just thought it was amazing to actually find clips of him speaking. The entire talk is in Portuguese, and he appears thoroughly comfortable.

Here are some articles on Ken Hale, for those who never heard of him. An extraordinary man, with a fully humanistic mission toward preserving endangered languages and cultures who represented some of what the best humanity had to offer.

Image

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/ ... 44,00.html
http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/ ... goyan.html
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/events/t ... onies.html (my favorite...the stories are amazing)

English, Spanish, Hopi, Hebrew, Navajo, Wampanoag, Warlpiri, Jemez, French, Polish, Papago, Ulwa, Miskitu, Aranda, Kaitish, Warramunga (Warumungu), Loritja (Luritja), Lardil, Yiddish, Maori, Paiute, Winnebago, Igbo, Dagur, Japanese, Gaelic, Pachuco, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Nggoth, Sumu, Amazigh, Norwegian, Danish, Arabic, Turkish, Aranda, Kaitish, Basque, Cherokee, Catalan, Arrernte, Kaytetye, Nahuatl, Mandarin.


The above is a list I've added to throughout the thread of languages I've found evidence of him speaking. We're up to 46 as of this most recent edit.

Here are just a few excerpts from his retirement congratulations...

Ken's linguistic ability is legendary. Everybody has a story to tell about it and I am no exception. In my early days at MIT, I think it was somewhere around 1978 Ken and I went to the Linguistic Society of America meeting in New York City. At lunchtime he had a couple of errands and asked me if I would like to come along. The first stop was at the Irish Consulate. He needed a visa for a visit. When we went into the consulate, he began the conversation in Gaelic. Ken and the person behind the counter must have conversed for about five minutes when the other person asked Ken if he spoke English. She apologized that her own Gaelic was not up to his.

I have told this story on other occasions and people have wondered why Ken spoke in Gaelic in the first place. The answer is simple courtesy. Ken believes that it is a mark of respect to speak to someone in their own language. If only I could be that respectful.

After the consulate we went to an international bookstore where Ken found a novel and a dictionary in Dutch. He was going off to Holland for a year to teach and work and wanted to learn a little Dutch before he got there. About a year later Jan Koster told me this story. He was walking through one of the corridors at the University of Tilbourg when he heard, but could not yet see, someone lecturing in Dutch on linguistics. He was surprised that there was someone on the Tilbourg staff who could lecture so authoritatively on the languages of the American South West and when he entered the room, he was astonished to see that it was Ken Hale. Jan told me Ken's Dutch was flawless.


Maybe the myths about Ken as a language savant are true. After all, he did come back to the department suddenly speaking Japanese after watching the mini-series Shogun with subtitles. I remember going to him my first year at MIT and discussing some ASL data that I thought might lead to a generals paper. A full year later, in the middle of a practice presentation for my generals exam, he raised his hand and corrected me on an ASL example that was inconsistent with the ones he had seen the year before. And, I had indeed mis-signed the example.


I'll never forget the time I had given you a handout containing St'at'imcets data, and we were to have an appointment. I walked into the appointment, and you immediately began writing St'at'imcets sentences on the board. Without looking at the handout. Making up St'at'imcets sentences from scratch (without mistakes), and in addition telling me how they reminded you of switch reference in a language I had never even heard of. There is no-one else who can instantly draw connections between phenomena in different languages the way you can.


Within a week of arriving in Yuendumu, many people started talking to me in Warlpiri - some because it was the only language they spoke - but others because they had heard I was a linguist, like that Japanangka from Mirika. You see Ken was the only linguist they had had experience of and he learned Warlpiri instantaneously, so all linguists must have this extraordinary power of being able to learn languages like Ken Hale. Sounds logical enough. Imagine the pressure, if one didn't learn to speak the language pretty darn quickly then what credibility did one have as a linguist? One was clearly a fraud. So to save face one threw oneself into learning to speak and understand Warlpiri as fast as one could.

About three months after settling into Yuendumu, I met a young Warlpiri man George Robertson Jampijinpa with whom I worked very closely for quite a few years. He had been taught to write Warlpiri by Ken in 1974 and he had a real flair for writing and for linguistic analysis. He used to regale me with stories about Ken Hale. He told me how he had travelled around with Ken to a number of Warlpiri communities and to other Aboriginal settlements.

He loved to recount how, in one of these villages called Lajamanu (known as Hooker Creek in those days), old ladies who were coming away from the local store with their arms full of purchases saw him with this white man and then as they approached (George was one of their relatives) they heard the white man speaking Warlpiri fluently and correctly - such was their shock that they dropped their shopping and fled!

Another of George's Ken Hale stories was that they would typically arrive at a place around 10am, Ken would start recording the local language with someone or other, and then by lunchtime Ken was conversing fluently in the language with the locals. George never ceased to be amazed at how quickly this white man could learn a new language. Warlpiris, like most Aboriginal people in central Australia, tend to be multilingual but white people in their experience rarely are. They have great difficulty understanding or speaking an Aboriginal language. Missionaries who had lived among the Warlpiri for over 20 years only knew a few words. So in this context, Ken was indeed exceptional. But then he was a linguist!


In August of 1997, my father and I had stopped for breakfast at a restaurant outside of Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation. It was a day typical of those I recall during my childhood here: windy, bright, with clouds moving across the broad expanse of sky, casting sharply demarcated shadows which sped across the contours of the beautiful and rugged landscape. As we walked across a dusty lot, passing cattle grazing on the median between the restaurant and the roadside, we were approached by a Navajo man. He asked if we had any change to spare. My father gave him several dollars and began conversing with the man in Navajo. In all of the many times that I have seen my father speak beautifully in diverse and indigenous languages, my amazement and wonder at his gift for language have never abated.

This unexpected fluency obviously surprised the Navajo man as well, whose face lit up with a smile and a look of comfort and familiarity. My father and the man continued with a short conversation, the meaning of which escaped me beyond the familiar Navaho salutations. As we walked into the restaurant, I asked: "What did you say, Dad?" He answered by saying only: "He used a word [in referring to us] reserved for those who are considered friends of the tribe, as close as a white man can be without being Navajo."
Last edited by Finny on Mon Nov 02, 2020 5:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
18 x

User avatar
BOLIO
Orange Belt
Posts: 205
Joined: Fri Aug 14, 2015 2:09 pm
Location: Texas
Languages: English (N) Spanish Advanced
Mandarin- Beginner
x 488

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby BOLIO » Sun May 22, 2016 12:43 pm

Thank you for posting this. I do not understand Portuguese but the links about him were fascinating. I had never heard of him but he was truly gifted and really cared about what he was doing.

Thanks again.
2 x
Reminder to myself: Perfection is useless and harmful. Just keep moving forward.

Finny
Green Belt
Posts: 260
Joined: Sun May 22, 2016 3:01 am
Languages: English...
x 582

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby Finny » Sun May 22, 2016 6:28 pm

You're welcome BOLIO, and yes, he was an inspiration. I try to keep his mindset close to heart when thinking of issues of language and culture, and of humanity.

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.''


http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/19/us/ke ... uages.html (from where the above quotations come)

I remember reading an earlier NYT article from the 90s where he'd already estimated at least 8 of the 50 odd languages he knew were extinct. And he discussed his methods for acquisition with his classic modesty here and there:

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.''


or here: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/31/us/to ... toast.html

"When you lose a language," he told an interviewer, "it's like dropping a bomb on a museum."

Professor Hale said he could never learn a language in a classroom.

''For me, it's got to be done with another person on a one-to-one basis,'' he said. ''I start with parts of the body and common animals and objects. I learn nouns. Then I pick up the sound system. I write that down.

''If it's not a written language, like Nggoth, which is spoken in Australia, 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.''


Regarding how many languages he knew...he claimed he could only "talk" English, Spanish, and Warlpiri, but his speaking knowledge was estimated in various places (e.g., here http://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/no ... obituaries) at 50. In attempting to put together a list of his languages, I come up with...

English, Spanish, Hopi, Hebrew, Navajo, Wampanoag, Warlpiri, Jemez, French, Polish, Papago, Ulwa, Miskitu, Aranda, Kaitish, Warramunga, Loritja, Lardil, Yiddish, Maori, Paiute, Winnebago, Igbo, Dagur, Japanese, Gaelic, Pachuco, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Nggoth, Sumu, Amazigh, Norwegian, Danish, Arabic, Turkish, Aranda, Kaitish, Basque, Cherokee.

That's 41, and there are still more.
5 x

User avatar
reineke
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3570
Joined: Wed Jan 06, 2016 7:34 pm
Languages: Fox (C4)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=6979
x 6554

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby reineke » Mon May 23, 2016 4:15 pm

"Maybe the myths about Ken as a language savant are true. After all, he did come back to the department suddenly speaking Japanese after watching the mini-series Shogun with subtitles."

Is this about the American television miniseries based on the novel of the same name by James Clavell? It reads like a joke. The author of the Economist article wasn't joking:

"Wherever he travelled he picked up a new tongue. ...in Ireland he spoke Gaelic so convincingly that an immigration officer asked if he knew English. He apologised to the Dutch for taking a whole week to master their somewhat complex language. He picked up the rudiments of Japanese after watching a Japanese film with subtitles."

Eh...may he rest in peace.
2 x

User avatar
Saim
Blue Belt
Posts: 676
Joined: Sun Nov 15, 2015 12:14 pm
Location: Rheinland
Languages: Native: English
Others: Catalan, Serbian, Spanish, Polish, Hungarian, Urdu, French etc.
Main focus: German
x 2314

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby Saim » Mon May 23, 2016 5:01 pm

My syntax professor at the University of Barcelona said that when he came to speak at a conference there people were wondering whether he would speak in English or Spanish. In the end he did it in Catalan.
12 x
log

شجرِ ممنوع 152

Finny
Green Belt
Posts: 260
Joined: Sun May 22, 2016 3:01 am
Languages: English...
x 582

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby Finny » Tue May 24, 2016 2:47 am

Saim wrote:My syntax professor at the University of Barcelona said that when he came to speak at a conference there people were wondering whether he would speak in English or Spanish. In the end he did it in Catalan.


Ha...surprising, yet, fully in line with the other stories. Adding your story to the pile, that's a 42nd language.
0 x

nooj
Brown Belt
Posts: 1257
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 12:59 pm
Languages: english (n)
x 3358

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby nooj » Wed Oct 04, 2017 2:45 am

I've heard Ken Hale stories through the grapevine. A lot of the linguists at my university at least knew of the man, some even met him.

Never knew the man but he (in part) changed my life at a moment where I was a bit lost. I changed my studies from Classics to Linguistics.
1 x
زندگی را با عشق
نوش جان باید کرد

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby Iversen » Thu Oct 05, 2017 7:59 am

It is a pity that the sound quality isn't better - it is especially hard to hear professor Hale (the other guy is clearer), but thanks for sharing. It is the first time I have heard Hale speak, and I'm happy that it was in a non-English language which I do understand. If he could do more or less the same thing in 42 languages then the man was amazing - and my first thought is of course what he had in his mental setup which others don't have. Maybe Mezzofanti had, maybe Krebs and a few others, and maybe us lesser mortals have some of it, but not quite as much, or we have different parts of it in differing quantities, but he just had all the ingredients it takes to make a true language genius.

I noticed (cfr. the quotes) that he always learnt directly from a person, not by studying in the ordinary sense. My own experience is that I can't use the direct input unless I already have prepared myself through formal study to grab the information emanating from my informant. Besides my memory needs every input item to be repeated again and again, and it is hard to find a human being who can deliver that in the same way as a wordlist or grammar book can - humans are simply too disorganized (and that also is true for paid mentors and teachers). One of the assets of Hale apparently was that he was able to pick up any piece of information the first time it occured in a conversation and KEEP it. Another could be that he had a linguistic sense (and savvy) that permitted him immediately to put all the information in the right place so that he could figure out the grammar of a new language. It is a shame that his way of learning wasn't scrutinized while he was alive - all we have got in this respect is a number of anecdotes and words of praise.
6 x

nooj
Brown Belt
Posts: 1257
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 12:59 pm
Languages: english (n)
x 3358

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby nooj » Sun Oct 08, 2017 2:42 am

I wonder what it would be like to have that kind of God-given ability to see, perceive, feel language in that way. Pardon me for being all mystical and stuff, but to be able to have the world at your fingertips in that kind of way is quite astonishing.

I ran into some of his work at the university library. He worked with the Warlpiri people for a Land title claim in court in 1980, he was the interpreter for the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, translating the arguments of the Warlpiri people and also giving the necessary kind of cultural background for the guy (an Anglo) to understand.

I've found this website made by Ken Hale's son, Ezra where you can hear Hale speak Warlpiri in depth. It is quite incredible. There's a funny bit where he switches from Warlpiri to Japanese in order to explain a concept better.

In 1994 Ken Hale (my father) made a recording of the Warlpiri language to send to his two sons Caleb and Ezra Hale (me). At the time Caleb and I were living away from our home town of Boston, MA in Atlanta, GA and Minneapolis, MN respectively. Dad spoke Warlpiri almost exclusively to us since we were infants so we understood Warlpiri (as he spoke it) in the same way that we understood our native English. He intended this tape as a reminder for us of various words and grammar particular to Warlpiri. In his classic form the entire tape is spoken in Warlpiri alone. Occasionally he will say an English word like "Sam Adams" his favorite beer, but other than that the entire tape is spoken in Warlpiri.

The original cassette tape is a full hour of Ken speaking about his favorite subjects in Warlpiri. I have broken the original tape into the segments he intended and have presented them in the chronological order of the original cassette tape. Below I provide a summary for each segment as well as a brief translation.

Warlpiri was only one of the many languages that my father spoke but he often said it was one of his favorite.For more information on my father Ken Hale you can read his wiki page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_L._Hale

I should note that I am not Warlpiri or a native Warlpiri speaker, nor was my father. I only understand and speak Warlpiri as it was spoken to me by a single person, my father, over the 31 years that I knew him. My father learned Warlpiri during his time in central Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Warlpiri language may have changed in the intervening half century since he learned it. I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies that might exist in these recordings or my translations.
7 x
زندگی را با عشق
نوش جان باید کرد

nooj
Brown Belt
Posts: 1257
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 12:59 pm
Languages: english (n)
x 3358

Re: 2 Videos of Kenneth Hale Speaking at a Conference in Portuguese

Postby nooj » Thu Dec 21, 2017 10:46 am

More Ken Hale stories from other linguists, from the paper 'Remembering Kenneth L. Hale
(1934-2001)'.

During my time at MIT Ken met with me frequently. I had heard many stories of Ken's ability to learn languages (according to one graduate student at
MIT at the time, it was believed that Ken only had to fly over a country to
learn its national language because, as the student said chuckling, Ken's
Universal Grammar has never shut off ). Still, I was surprised one day, waiting outside Ken's office to hear Ken speaking to a Chinese Visiting Scholar
in what turned out to be Mandarin. When the Chinese linguist emerged from
Ken's office, I asked So, how's Ken's Chinese?Just like being home, came
the immediate reply. That summer, teaching at the SIL summer school in North
Dakota, I asked SIL members Dean and Lucille Saxton how fluent Ken was in
Papago/O'odham (the language that the Saxtons worked in and the first language Ken had learned after English). Lucille Saxton responded, with Dean
nodding vigorous assent, that Well, you know, we have worked for about
thirty years on this language and Ken just drops in once in a while. Every
time we hear him speak, we feel embarrassed, though, because Ken's Papago
is so much better than ours. He sounds native. (Later, when I repeated this
story to Ken, he said That's silly. I don't speak Papago nearly as well as they
do.) Another story: R. M. W. Dixon is one of the most difficult linguists to
impress I have met. But he told me that if he had an idol in linguistics it was
Ken Hale. (Ken, according to Bob, was the reason that Bob had begun research in Australia. Before M. A. K. Halliday (Dixon's PhD thesis advisor)
had pointed out to Bob Ken Hale's work, Bob had wanted to do research in
the Northwestern United States, on Salishan languages.) During overlapping
field work stays in Brazil, Dixon told me a story of receiving a tape from
Ken which was to be played for the speakers of an endangered Australian language. According to Bob, Ken had only visited the speakers of this language
for a week or so. But the entire tape was Ken speaking in the language in question after only a few days in the village, following an absence of many
years.

One question that used to intrigue me is why Ken Hale learned all the languages he learned, and continued learning them after he was more famous and
respected than most other linguists alive. Although humorous, the idea that Ken
had a special relation to Universal Grammar does not provide a satisfying account of his language-learning ability. I know that Ken made mistakes in speaking languages and that it was always a tremendous investment of labor for him
to master a new language (even if the learning got simpler after the first dozen
or so, it was still hard). And Ken would lecture in languages even when he was
completely aware that he could not speak well, pushing himself to perform in
very difficult circumstances. Why? The answer is simple. If we consider the
totality of Ken Hale's interactions with others, his kindness, his humility, his
building up of others, it is clear, to me at least, that KEN HALE LOVED PEOPLE.I believe that love of people motivated Ken to learn languages, not merely
science. Ken knew that speaking someone's language is a deep expression of
respect and care for them, of love. It is rare to see a scientist of any rank who
is motivated by love of others more than sense of career. But this is the only
conclusion I have been able to arrive at, as I have, for many years, pondered
the striking kindness and gentleness of Kenneth Hale. He was a rare man of
love, whose very interest in language was sparked by his love of the O'odham
friends he made as a young man on his family's ranch in Arizona. We don't
beatify people in science. But we ought to recognize that there are rare individuals whose character is properly inspiring to the rest of us. Ken Hale was
this kind of person. It is my hope that his example will challenge each of us to
reflect on the nature of our interactions with our fellow linguists, on the kind
of research we do, and on our respect and concern for the speakers of minority
languages around the world


His interest in language began in childhood (when he learned any foreign
languages spoken by his schoolmates) and continued to the very end of his life.
He did not learn languages the way most of us do; his initial step was to acquire
the phonological system of a language and control it completely, then go on
to acquire the syntax, which was his major interest. His extraordinary natural
talent as a language learner readily convinced speakers of unwritten languages
that he was capable of acquiring the minutest details of their languages; his
natural modesty and courtesy made native speakers comfortable in working
with him, and so learn from him things they themselves were not consciously
aware of about their own languages


For several crazy years (it was in Contra War time and in war zone) we
worked out of the offices of CIDCA-Bluefields, and he became the famous Mr
Kent people there will talk about for a long time. He had already learned to speak Miskitu, of course, and immediately plunged into learning Ulwa, enjoying immensely the surprise effect he produced by making speeches in front
of the Karawala community in both Miskitu and Ulwa. He worked tirelessly
and selflessly for years: he not only produced descriptions of those languages,
butorganized and lead workshops for bilingual teachers, created and supported
an Ulwa language team he set up to produce a dictionary of the language as well
as teaching materials for the school program, raised funds (including generous
contributions of his own) to build them a center in the village and to pay salaries
for the team members and the bilingual school teachers, and recruited an M.I.T.
graduate student (Tom Green) to work with them on a more continuous basis.


At a personal level Ken was gentle, humble, generous, and respectful. In the
1960's white Australians thought he was a Communist stirrer for treating
Aborigines as equals and learning their languages. Aboriginal people found
him remarkable because he was a Japanangka able to 'talk language' with all that entails for the social and cultural embeddedness of linguistic knowledge
in Australia (Sutton 2001).
9 x
زندگی را با عشق
نوش جان باید کرد


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests