Hale, Horatio Emmons

Hale, Horatio Emmons, 1817–96, American-Canadian ethnologist, b. Newport, N.H.; son of Sarah Josepha Hale. He served as ethnologist on the Charles Wilkes exploring expedition (1838–42) and wrote Vol. VI, entitled Ethnography and Philology, of the expedition's reports; that volume was the first significant scholarly work on the peoples of Polynesia. He also wrote An International Idiom (1890), a study of the Chinook jargon, a lingua franca of the Pacific Northwest, and many significant papers on Native American languages and customs. From 1856 he lived in Ontario, Canada, where he also was involved in the improvement of the provincial education system.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Language and Linguistics: Biographies