Hoenigswald was born Heinrich Max Franz Hönigswald in Breslau, German Empire (now Wrocław, Poland).

His refugee status compelled these moves (his grandparents were Jewish, and by 1933 Jews were forbidden to attend German universities).

His arrival in the United States meant not only an end of political oppression but also working contact with scholars who were establishing linguistics as a science, notably Zellig Harris.

Deeply familiar with the solid work done by historical linguists, but skeptical by nature,[4] he rapidly came to question their stated rationale and justification for these results,[5] "the gap between substantive practice and theoretical preachment".

[7] It exemplifies well several cardinal features of all his work: his conciseness of expression, his formal methods, his recognition that changes, whether in phonology, morphology, or semantics, are changes in the distribution of elements relative to one another, including nil as an element, and his conviction that it is not proper to present historical materials "downward, as history" but rather "upward in time, as inference".