Robert Hetzron
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Robert Hetzron | |
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| Born | Robert Herzog 31 December 1937 University of Budapest |
| Occupation | Linguist |
Robert Hetzron, born Herzog (31 December 1937,
Biography
Born in Hungary, as a child, Hetzron received both a general and religious Jewish education. He attended 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).
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 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 Cushiticlanguages in 1965-66 and was awarded the Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1966. His appointment to UCSB followed immediately thereafter.
Selected publications
Hungarian Language
- Hetzron, R. (1962) L'accent en hongrois. Paris, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 57, pp. 192–205.
- Hetzron, R. (1964) Les syntagmes à totalisateur du hongrois. Word 20, 55-71.
Cushitic languages
- Hetzron, R. (1969). The Verbal System of Southern Agaw. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. (Ph.D.-thesis)
Ethiopian Semitic languages
- Hetzron, R. (1972). Ethiopian Semitic: studies in classification. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-1123-X.
- Hetzron, R. (1977). The Gunnän-Gurage Languages. Napoli: Istituto Orientale di Napoli.
- Hetzron, R. (1996). "The two futures in Central and Peripheral Western Gurage". In Grover Hudson (ed.). Essays on Gurage language and culture: dedicated to Wolf Leslau on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. pp. 101–109.
- Chamora, B.; Hetzron, R. (2000). Inor. Munich: Lincom Europa. ISBN 3-89586-977-5.
Comparative study of Semitic and Afroasiatic languages
- Hetzron, R. (1990). "Afroasiatic Languages". In Bernard Comrie (ed.). The World's major languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- R.Hetzron, ed. (1997). The Semitic languages. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-05767-1.
Commemoration
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.
Notes
- ^ a b Siegbert Uhlig; et al., eds. (2005). "Hetzron, Robert". Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. Vol. 2: D-Ha. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 24–25.
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.
External links
- NACAL - The North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics
- An obituary by Grover Hudson.
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