Hook was born in southwestern Connecticut and attended public and private school in northeastern Ohio. He graduated from Harvard College in 1964^[2] and went to India as a member of the American Peace Corps before earning his PhD in Indo-Aryan linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is married to Prof. Hsin-hsin Liang who directs the Chinese language program at the University of Virginia. They have a daughter Leise and a son Lawrence.

Hook's academic interest has been in the linguistic description of languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan family in South Asia, and more broadly in their place in Masica's Indo-Turanian linguistic area. At Michigan, he taught Hindi at all levels, occasionally other South Asian languages, along with courses in linguistics and South Asian literature for three and a half decades, and published on both Indo-Aryan languages and linguistics.

His chief contributions are The Compound Verb in Hindi and numerous articles on the compound verb and other syntactic and semantic phenomena in western Indo-Aryan languages and dialects spoken in North India, West India, and Pakistan: Kashmiri, Marathi, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Shina, and Sanskrit. After Jules Bloch in his La Formation de la Langue Marathe,^[3] Hook was the first to realize that Kashmiri, not unlike German, has V2 word order.^[4] More recent publications have refined the notion of South Asia as a linguistic area^[5] as first adumbrated by Murray Emeneau^[6] and - with the addition of Central Asia and Eastern Asia - expanded by Colin Masica.^[7]

• Semantic neutrality in complex predicates in East and South Asian languages. (with Prashant Pardeshi and Hsin-Hsin Liang). In Linguistics 50: 605-632.
• Searching for the Goddess: A study of sensory and other impersonal causative expressions in the Shina of Gilgit. (with Muhammad Amin Zia). Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2005. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp 165–188. ISBN 978-3110186185
• Where do Compound Verbs Come from? And where are they Going?. In Bhaskararao, P., and K.V. Subbarao, Eds. South Asia yearbook 2001: Papers from the symposium on South Asian languages: contact, convergence and typology. Delhi: SAGE Publications. Pp. 101–30.
• The compound verb in Chinese and Hindi-Urdu and the plausibility of macro linguistic areas. (with Hsin-hsin Liang). In Old and New Perspectives on South Asian Languages: Grammar and Semantics, Colin Masica, Ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. pp. 105–126. ISBN 978-8120832084
• Kesar of Layul: A Central Asian Epic in the Shina of Gultari. In Studies in Pakistani Popular Culture. Wm. Hanaway and Wilma Heston, Eds. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel and Lok Virsa. pp. 121–183. ISBN 978-9693507027
• The Emergence of Perfective Aspect in Indo-Aryan. In Approaches to Grammaticalization. Vol. 2. B. Heine and E. Traugott, Eds. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 59–89. ISBN 902722899X, 9789027228994
• A Note on Expressions of Involuntary Experience in the Shina of Skardu. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 53:77-82.
• The Marriage of Heroines and the Definition of a Literary Area in South and Central Asia. In Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, M. M. Deshpande and P. E. Hook, Eds., Karoma. 1979. pp. 35–54. ISBN 978-0891480457
• Linguistic Areas: Getting at the Grain of History. In Festschrift for Henry Hoenigswald, On the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. George Cardona and Norman H. Zide, Eds. Tuebingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. pp. 155–168. ISBN 3878083653, 9783878083658
• Hindi Structures: Intermediate Level. Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan. 1979. ISBN 9780891480167
• The Compound Verb in Hindi. Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan. 1974. ISBN 978-0891480518

• Competition between vectored verbs and factored verbs (複合動詞における Vector 動詞と Factor 動詞の競合について) [1]
• Manetta, Emily. 2011. Peripheries in Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu: The Syntax of Discourse-driven Movement. John Benjamins. [2]