Robert Hetzron

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Robert Hetzron (1937 – 1997) was an American linguist who focused primarily on Afro-Asiatic languages, especially those in Ethiopia and Gurage Ethiopian Semitic languages. On the occasion of his death in 1997, Robert Backus composed the following tribute to him:

Robert Hetzron was appointed Assistant Professor in the (then) Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1966 to initiate a program in Hebrew language and literature. He became Associate Professor in 1969 and Professor in 1974. Although this appointment largely defined his teaching career, his scholarly interests and research were far more extensive. He was first and foremost a linguist who specialized in Afroasiatic languages and whose work embraced comparative studies, semantic analysis and theoretical aspects of grammar. At the same time he had a nice appreciation of the nuances of literature, which began to show up in his late publications in the form of translation and textual analysis. Robert's development as a linguist proceeded from an early phase of intralingual description and analysis outward toward a comprehensive interlingual perspective focusing on comparison and theory. A large proportion of his work had to do with the Afroasiatic languages, where he made contributions in comparative and historical studies that fundamentally defined that field. He wrote also on the Semitic languages ancillary to his Afroasiatic interests, and he made a special study with considerable publication of his native language, Hungarian. English also provided grist for his mill, serving up material for some of his theoretical work.

Robert's polyglotism seems to have started from the force of circumstances. Born in Budapest in 1937, he just managed to gain admittance into the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest in 1956, when the failure of the Hungarian uprising expelled him to France as a refugee. From 1957 to 1961 he lived the life of a peripatetic student marked by stints at the University of Strasbourg, the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, the École des Hautes Études, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the University of Vienna, as well as schools in Finland, England, and Italy This exploratory period ended in the fall of 1961, when Robert emigrated to Israel and entered the Hebrew University as a graduate student. After a year's service in the Israeli army, he completed his interrupted education there by earning an M.A. in linguistics (Semitic languages) in 1964. In the fall of that year he entered the Ph.D. program of the Department of Near Eastern Languages at UCLA. He did fieldwork in Ethiopia on Semitic and Cushitic languages in 1965-66 and was awarded the Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1966. His appointment to UCSC followed immediately thereafter.

Though settled at UCSB, Robert pursued professional interests that frequently took him abroad. As a Guggenheim Fellow he spent the year 1976-77 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 1980-81 he did field work in Hungary, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. The year 1981 also found him in Austria, as a visiting professor at the University of Vienna and the University of Salzburg. In 1990-91 he was a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At home, he made a lasting contribution to the field of Afroasiatic studies by founding and editing the Journal of Afroasiatic Languages, which began publication in 1987. Embodied in five books and over 60 articles, not to mention reviews, chapters, and contributions to encyclopedias, Robert Hetzron's scholarship is impressive, undeniably the product of an energetic and exceptionally intelligent mind.

The 35th annual meeting of the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL 35, San Antonio, 2007), which was initiated by Robert Hetzron at Santa Barbara in 1972, is dedicated to his memory.

[edit] Publications

1969: The Verbal System of Southern Agaw. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. (Ph.D.-thesis)
1972: Ethiopian Semitic: studies in classification. Manchester. ISBN 0-7190-1123-X
1977: The Gunnän-Gurage Languages. Napoli: Istituto Orientale di Napoli.
1996: "The two futures in Central and Peripheral Western Gurage", in: G. Hudson (ed.), Essays on Gurage language and culture : dedicated to Wolf Leslau on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp. 101-109.
1997: (ed.) The Semitic languages. Routledge: London. ISBN 0-415-05767-1.
2000: (with Berhanu Chamora), Inor. Münich: Lincom Europa. ISBN 3-89586-977-5.

[edit] References

Gideon Goldenberg, "In memoriam Robert Hetzron", in: Aethiopica 2 (1999), pp. 198-200.
Andrzej Zaborski (ed.), New data and new methods in Afroasiatic linguistics: Robert Hetzron in memoriam. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2001.
Andrzej Zaborski, "Robert Hetzron (1938-1997) : bibliography", in: New data and new methods ... (see above), pp. xi-xix.