Robert Hetzron

Robert Hetzron, born Herzog (31 December 1938, Budapest – 12 August 1997, Santa Barbara, California), was a Hungarian-born linguist known for his work on the comparative study of Afro-Asiatic languages, as well as for his study of Cushitic and Ethiopian Semitic languages.

Born in Hungary, Hetzron studied at the University of Budapest. After the 1956 Uprising in Hungary, he moved to Vienna and then to Paris, where he studied with André Martinet and Joseph Tubiana. In 1960/61 he studied Finnish at Jyväskylä, Somali in London, and Italian at Perugia. He received his M.A. degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1961-1964 under the supervision of Hans Jakob Polotsky, and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1964-1966 under the supervision of Wolf Leslau. From 1966 and until his death he was professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Hetzron offered original ideas; first of all, about lingusitic subgrouping in diachrony. According to his explicit and theoretically grounded classification of Semitic, Arabic was grouped in Central rather than South Semitic. He demonstrated that in Ethiopian Semitic, the Gurage group is not genetically valid. His attempt to integrate the description of stress and intonation into syntax is unique (see his Hungarian publications).