Hetzron

[Edith A Moravcsik]

The following is an obituary for Robert Hetzron written by Grover Hudson.

********

Forwarded message:
>>From hudson at pilot.msu.edu Wed Sep 17 09:21:30 1997
>Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 10:21:26 -0400
>Message-Id: <v03007801b045615b525c@[35.8.73.18]>
>In-Reply-To: <199709162228.RAA24370 at alpha1.csd.uwm.edu>
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii"
>To: Edith A Moravcsik <edith at csd.uwm.edu>
>From: Grover Hudson <hudson at pilot.msu.edu>
>Subject: Re: Hetzron
>
>Robert Hetzron
>
>
>Robert Hetzron left a wide and rich array of publications as evidence
>of his extraordinary knowledge of theory and data, his rare imagination
>and creativity, and great love of languages and linguistics which will
>be greatly missed in all the several fields in which he worked with
>unique insight and energy for over thirty-five years: Semitic,
>Hungarian, Cushitic, Afroasiatic, and theoretical linguistics
>encompassing phonology, morphology, and syntax.
>
>       Robert did his M.A. at Hebrew University under H. J. Polotsky, writing
>a thesis on Amharic pronominalization, and his doctorate in Near
>Eastern Languages at UCLA, finishing in 1966, a time in which he
>benefited from the ambitiously growing linguistics program being
>developed there by Robert Stockwell, as well as by the strong Near
>Eastern Studies Department built and led by Wolf Leslau, under whose
>tutelage in 1965-66 he undertook fieldwork for his dissertation on The
>Verbal System of Southern Agaw (Awngi), a Cushitic language of central
>Ethiopia, subsequently published as University of California monograph
>in Near Eastern Studies 12 (1969).  He later complemented this study
>with one on 'The nominal system of Awngi (Southern Agaw)' (Bulletin of
>the School of Oriental and African Studies 41, 1978), and other
>articles on Agaw.
>
>       During his short stay in Ethiopia he was able, surprisingly but
>certainly by hard and well focused work, to acquire extensive data as
>well on several of the Gurage languages, which became a topic to which
>he regularly returned and on which he was busy at the time of his death
>on August 12, which came, indeed, weeks after he had organized an
>informal seminar on the Gurage languages at his home in Santa Barbara,
>where he had gone to teach immediately after finishing his studies at
>UCLA.  There over the years Robert always welcomed his friends, and
>entertained everyone with his conversational expertise and, if you were
>lucky, by his gourmet cooking as well, and by a short walk down the
>hill to watch sunset over the Channel Islands.  Despite the tranquility
>and beauty of the place, Robert felt isolated in Santa Barbara, and I
>wish that I and others had had more occasions and made more time to
>visit there.
>
>       Robert's first publication appears to have been on his native
>Hungarian, 'L'accent en hongrois' (Bulletin de la Societe de
>linguistique de Paris 52, 1962), but he soon began to write on Amharic,
>with 'La rection du theme factitif en amharique' (La Museon 76, 1963),
>followed soon by 'La voyelle du sixieme ordre in Amharic' (Journal of
>African Language 3, 1964), which examined the near complete
>predictability of the Amharic high central vowel, a problem to which
>students of Amharic have been responding since, and then, based on his
>M.A. thesis, 'Pronominalization in Amharic' (Journal of Semitic Studies
>11, 1966).  His careful study of case usage in Amharic, 'Toward a case
>grammar of Amharic' (Studies in African Linguistics 1, 1970), was the
>first part of what was to have been a longer work which, unfortunately,
>he did not finish.
>
>       He soon began to write on Gurage languages, which, more than Agaw,
>connected with his broader and diachronic interests --in Semitic and,
>more generally, Afroasiatic.  His first Gurage paper (certainly written
>during his mere seven months in Ethiopia --which fieldwork was soon to
>yield three books) was a collaboration with Habte Mariam Marcos, 'Des
>traits superposes en ennemor' (Journal of Ethiopian Studies 4, 1966),
>followed by a truly seminal paper, 'Main verb markers in Northern
>Gurage' (Africa, 1968), which argued for the preservation in these
>languages of a Semitic copula, in which article he also introduced his
>innovative and controversially detailed classification of Ethiopian
>Semitic.  He developed this classification further in studies which
>examined specific morphological features which he argued to be
>genetically diagnostic as arbitrary innovations not attributable to
>heritage or accident, such as 'Internal labialization in the tt-group
>of Outer South Ethiopic' (Journal of the American Oriental Society 91,
>1971), and 'Two notes on Semitic laryngeals in East Gurage' (Phonetica
>19, 1970), which reconstructed the Semitic laryngeals from reflexes as
>nasal insertions.  He followed these with his influential and still
>standard survey of historical Ethiopian Semitic, Ethiopian Semitic:
>Studies in Classification (Journal of Semitic Studies monograph 2,
>1972), and then a book on the Gurage languages less the Eastern
>sub-group: The Gunnan-Gurage Languages (Istituto orientale di Napoli,
>1977).  His Ethiopian Semitic classification became one of his
>contributions to Language in Ethiopia (M. L. Bender et al, eds., 1976).
>
>
>       His work on Gurage classification and the controversy which this
>inspired caused Robert to realize the importance of two
>little-understood principles in genetic classification, which he
>elaborated in 'Two principles of genetic classification' (Lingua,
>1976): 'archaic heterogeneity' and 'shared morpholexical innovations',
>and applied in papers such as 'The evidence for perfect *y'aqtul and
>jussive *yaqt'ul in proto-Semitic' (Journal of Semitic Studies 14,
>1969), 'An archaism in the Cushitic verbal conjugation' (IV Congresso
>Internationale di Studi Etiopici, 1974), and 'Innovations in the
>Semitic numeral system' (Journal of Semitic Studies 22, 1977).  As a
>result, he was able for the first time to give coherence to Cushitic as
>a genetic group in 'The limits of Cushitic' (Sprache und Geschichte in
>Afrika 2, 1980, written in London on a Guggenheim fellowship), and new
>perspective on subgrouping within Semitic in 'La division des langues
>semitiques' (Premier Congres International de Etudes Semitique et
>Chamito-Semitique, 1974).
>
>       Soon Robert knew Afroasiatic as well as anyone, but perhaps owing to
>the critical eye toward unripe ideas which he applied to his own work
>as well as that of others (I will mention only a couple of his many
>reviews here, which invariably add significantly to the works
>reviewed), he avoided claims concerning Afroasiatic subgrouping and
>reconstruction, even in his masterful survey of diachronic and
>synchronic Afroasiatic in The World's Major Languages (Bernard Comrie,
>ed., 1987; which volume also includes his surveys of Hebrew and
>Semitic).
>
>       Along the way, and despite the fact that at UC Santa Barbara he lacked
>the important stimulus of teaching in these areas, Robert energetically
>pursued several lines of well-developed interest in general theoretical
>linguistics, writing influential articles on word order, including
>'Presentative function and presentative movement' (Studies in African
>Linguistics supplement, 1971) and 'Disjoining conjoined structures'
>(Papers in Linguistics 5, 1972), and on the phonology-syntax interface
>with his 'Phonology in syntax' (Journal of Linguistics 8, 1972) and
>'Where the grammar fails' (Language 51, 1975).  With thorough command
>of Afroasiatic and Hungarian and good knowledge of Romance linguistics
>(especially evident in e.g. his 'Clitic pronouns and their linear
>representation' Forum Linguisticum 1, 1977; he also published articles
>on Somali, Syriac, and Omotic), and as a contributor in several areas
>of theoretical linguistics, Robert was one of very few scholars fully
>able to review wide-ranging works like Current Trends in Linguistics
>VI: South-west Asia and North Africa (Thomas Sebeok, ed., 1970,
>reviewed in Linguistics 140, 1974, where he noted the likely
>Afroasiatic roots of root and pattern morphology) and the four volumes
>of Universals of Human Language (Joseph Greenberg, ed., 1978, reviewed
>in Lingua 50, 1980).
>
>       Unfortunately I cannot speak with competence about Robert's numerous
>publications on Hungarian linguistics, but it seems that his
>contributions there must be outstanding and often unique, particularly
>his several papers on Hungarian accent, from his first, 1962, article
>mentioned above, to his recent 'Prosodic morphemes in Hungarian'
>(Approaches to Hungarian, vol. 4, ed. by I. Kenesei and Cs. Pleh,
>1992), which places Hungarian near the middle in a continuum of
>tonality in languages.
>
>       As his health failed in recent years, Robert continued to work with
>energy in all the areas of his interest, and enjoyed the joys and
>frustrations of editorship in bringing about himself an up-to-date
>manual of comparative Semitic the need for which he had called
>attention in his Semitic survey in The World's Major Languages.  This
>volume, The Semitic Languages, with 24 authors, should appear this year
>from Routledge, and in it he himself provides articles on the place of
>Semitic in Afroasiatic, and on Outer South Ethiopic.
>
>       Maybe the literature has now grown too vast, and maybe the world now
>provides too many diversions, preventing the possibility of other
>linguists with such an exceptional combination of knowledge, insight,
>creativity, and energy.  At least there was Robert Hetzron, and the
>many who did not know him can benefit from his rich and encompassing
>body of work, in which one can always find lengthy and thorough
>reference to prior work, typically with generous acknowledgements of
>his consultations with others.  I have been able to mention just a
>selection of his publications here, and have omitted very many items
>which others would surely insist must be mentioned.  Everyone has the
>benefit of his work now, and those of us fortunate to have known Robert
>can continue to benefit as well as from our fond memories of him.
>
>       Robert's ex-wife Gabriella Barber is cataloging and organizing the
>unfinished papers which Robert left behind to seethat this work
>completed and made available.  Those with knowledge about these
>projects and otherwise willing to contribute should
>
>contact her at magyar at west.net (698 Zink Ave Santa Barbara, Ca 93111)
>
>
>Grover Hudson
>
>Michigan State University
>
>hudson at pilot.msu.edu
>
>
>
>


--

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                                 Edith A. Moravcsik
                                 Department of Linguistics
                                 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
                                 Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
                                 USA

                                 E-mail: edith at csd.uwm.edu
                                 Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/
                                            (414) 332-0141 /home/
                                 Fax: (414) 229-6258