Robert A. Hall

Robert Anderson Hall Jr. (April 4, 1911 – December 2, 1997) was an American linguist who specialized in Romance languages.

Early life Hall was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on April 4, 1911. Most of his childhood was spent in Minnesota and New England.

He received his BA from Princeton in 1931, having majored in French and German literature. He then began an MA at the University of Chicago, where he studied linguistics with Harry Hoijer and Leonard Bloomfield and classical Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Avestan, and Old Persian) with Carl Darling Buck and George Bobrinskoy.

He took a break from his graduate studies at Chicago in order to travel to Italy to study Italian literature and historical linguistics, which led to his receiving a DLitt from the University of Rome in 1934.

Upon returning to United States, he completed the remaining requirements for his MA, which was awarded in 1935. As he had already received a DLitt from the University of Rome, he chose not to pursue a PhD at Chicago.

Career Hall began his academic career at the University of Puerto Rico in 1936, and then moved to Princeton in 1939 and Brown in 1940.

In 1943, he went to work at U.S. Armed Forces Institute (USAFI) in Washington, where he helped to produce textbooks for French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese as part of the "Spoken Language" series. This series was to have a significant effect on the teaching of foreign languages in the United States. He also contributed to the Armed Services Training Program (ASTP).

At the invitation of J Milton Cowan, Hall joined the faculty at Cornell in 1946 and helped to found the Division of Modern Languages there. When he retired in 1975, he received the title of Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Italian.

In addition to the Romance languages, he had a strong interest in pidgin and creole languages. He also took an interest in the controversial Kensington Runestone, which he believed to be genuine.

Hall was a critic of the theories of Noam Chomsky.

Personal life In 1936, Hall married Frances L. Adkins, with whom he had three children (one son and two daughters). After Adkins's death in 1975, Hall married Alice M. Colby-Hall.

A fan of P. G. Wodehouse, Hall wrote a book on Wodehouse's comic style and served as the president of the Wodehouse Society from 1983 to 1985.

He died from Parkinson's disease at the Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, New York, on December 2, 1997, at the age of 86.

Notable works An Analytical Grammar of the Hungarian Language. 1938. . Melanesian Pidgin English: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary. 1943. . Descriptive Italian Grammar. 1948. . Leave Your Language Alone!. 1950. . . A Short History of Italian Literature. 1951. . Haitian Creole: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary. 1953. Hands Off Pidgin English!. 1955. . . Italian for Modern Living. 1959. . Linguistics and Your Language. 1960. . Sound and Spelling in English. 1961. Idealism in Romance Linguistics. 1963. . . Introductory Linguistics. 1964. . . New Ways to Learn a Foreign Language. 1966. . Pidgin and Creole Languages. 1966. . An Essay on Language. 1968. La struttura dell'italiano. 1971. . . External History of the Romance Languages. 1974. . The Comic Style of P. G. Wodehouse. 1974. . Stormy Petrel in Linguistics. 1975. . American Linguistics, 1925–1969: Three Essays. 1976. . Proto-Romance Phonology. 1976. . Antonio Fogazzaro. 1978. . Language, Literature, and Life: Selected Essays. 1978. . The Kensington Rune-Stone is Genuine: Linguistic, Practical, Methodological Considerations. 1982. . Linguistics and Pseudo-Linguistics: Selected Essays, 1965–1985. 1987. . A Life for Language: A Biographical Memoir of Leonard Bloomfield. 1990. . The Kensington Rune-Stone, Authentic and Important: A Critical Edition. 1994. .