Descriptive Studies in Spanish Grammar (1954);
Spoken Greek (1945-46);
Lingua Franca in the Levant (1958)

Renée and Henry Kahane, Professors of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese

Descriptive Studies in Spanish Grammar (1954);
Spoken Greek (1945-46);
Lingua Franca in the Levant (1958)

Henry Kahne was born in Berlin, Germany (1902) studying Literaturewissenschaft specializing in Romance linguistics. Renée, née Toole of Irish ancestry, born in Cephalonia, Ionian Island met Henry in 1927 while they were both phd students. She greatly influenced his interest in Mediterranean studies and all of their publications were jointly researched in a “unique life-long collaboration.” They were married in 1931, after Renée finished her dissertation on “the morphological problem of the augmentative feminine in Romance.” Henry spent a week in a Florentine prison in 1938, during a visit between Hitler and Mussolini when many Germans and Austrians in Italy were held hostage in prison. Soon after the couple decided to immigrate to the US and arrived in New York at Christmas in 1939.

Henry adopted an American structuralist approach to linguistics, while Renée maintained the dialectal methodology of her European training.

--Language, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 237-244

1941-1971