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Back to article: WILLIAM GARDNER HALE (1849- )

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HALE, WILLIAM GARDNER (1849- ), American classical scholar, was born on the 9th of February 1849 in Savannah, Georgia. He graduated at Harvard University in 1870, and took a post-graduate course in philosophy there in 1874-1876; studied classical philology at Leipzig and Gottingen in 1876-1877; was tutor in Latin at Harvard from 1877 to r88o, and professor of Latin in Cornell University from 188o to 1892, when he became professor of Latin and head of the Latin department of the University of Chicago. From 1894 to 1899 he was chairman and in 1895-1896 first director of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. He is best known as an original teacher on questions of syntax. In The Cum-Constructions: Their History and Functions, which appeared in Cornell University Studies in Classical Philology (1888-1889; and in German version by Neizert in 1891), he attacked Hoffmann's distinction between absolute and relative temporal clauses as published in Lateinische Zeitpartikeln (1874); Hoffmann replied in 1891, and the best summary of the controversy is in Wetzel's Der Streit zwischen Hoffmann and Hale (1892). Hale wrote also The Sequence of Tenses in Latin (1887-1888), The Anticipatory Subjunctive in Greek and Latin (1894), and a Latin Grammar (1903), to which the parts on sounds, inflection and word-formation were contributed by Carl Darling Buck.