Halle was born on July 23, 1923, in
Liepāja,
Latvia, as
Morris Pinkowitz (). In 1929 he moved with his
Jewish family to
Riga. He arrived in the United States in 1940 and graduated from
George Washington High School. From 1941 to 1943, he studied engineering at the
City College of New York. He entered the
United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in 1946, at which point he went to the
University of Chicago, where he got his
master's degree in linguistics in 1948. He then studied at
Columbia University under
Roman Jakobson, became a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, and earned his
PhD from
Harvard University in 1955. He is considered to be, with Noam Chomsky, the founder of the modern linguistics department at MIT. He retired from MIT in 1996, but he remained active in research and publication. He was fluent in
German,
Yiddish,
Latvian,
Russian,
Hebrew and
English. Halle was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1960. He was
President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1974. He was also a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the
National Academy of Sciences. Halle was married for fifty-six years to painter, artist and activist Rosamond Thaxter Halle (née Strong), until her death in April 2011. They had three sons: David, John and Timothy. Halle resided in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died on April 2, 2018, at the age of 94. ==References==