Helmut Rix

Helmut Rix (4 July 1926, in Amberg – 3 December 2004, in Freiburg im Breisgau) was a German linguist and professor of the Sprachwissenschaftliches Seminar of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany.

He is best known for his research into Indo-European and Etruscan languages, as well as the author of the hypothesis of Tyrrhenian languages.

Helmut Rix was born in 1926 in Amberg to a family of teachers. Following high school and conscripted service in the Nazi navy during World War II, he studied Indo-European studies, classical philology, and history at Wurzburg in 1946 and Heidelberg from 1947. There he received his doctorate in 1950 with his dissertation Bausteine zu einer Hydronymie Alt-Italiens. From 1951 he was assistant to Hans Krahe at Tübingen and from 1955 lecturer in Latin and Greek at the Lutheran Augustana Divinity School in Neuendettelsau. In 1959 he qualified as a full professor at Tübingen with the habilitation thesis, Das etruskische Cognomen (published in 1963 by Harrassowitz). In 1966, Rix took a position at the newly established University of Regensburg and in 1982 professorship at the University of Freiburg. He retired in 1993 and died in 2004 from a traffic accident.