Robert Hetzron, born Herzog (31 December 1937, 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.
Biography
Born in Hungary, as a child, Hetzron received both a general and religious Jewish education. He attended the University of Budapest, where he studied the Hungarian language and Hebrew as major subjects and started attending courses in the Department of Semitic Philology and Arabic. However, a few months later, he fled Budapest by foot following the 1956 Uprising in Hungary. He briefly stayed in Vienna and studied for a time in Strasbourg, before finally settling in Paris, where he studied linguistics 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.