Background
Rix, Helmut was born on July 4, 1926 in Amberg, Bayern, Germany. Son of Hans and Susanne Rix.
Rix, Helmut was born on July 4, 1926 in Amberg, Bayern, Germany. Son of Hans and Susanne Rix.
After graduating high school and military service in the navy, he studied Indo-European studies, classical philology, and history at Wurzburg in 1946 and Heidelberg from 1947.
He is best known for his research into Indo-European and Etruscan languages, as well as the author of the hypothesis of Tyrrhenian languages. There he received his doctorate in 1950 with his dissertation Bausteine zu einer Hydronymie Alternate-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 (Neuendettelsau) in Neuendettelsau.
In 1959 he qualified as a professor at Tübingen with the publication, Das etruskische Cognomen.
Untersuchungen zu System, Morphologie und Verwendung der Personennamen auf den jüngeren Inschriften Nordetruriens (published 1963 in Wiesbaden). In 1966 Rix was appointed to newly established University of Regensburg and in 1982 as professor at the University of Freiburg.
He retired in 1993 and died as the result of a traffic accident in 2004.
Member of Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Married Emilie Figge. Children: Susanne, Hans Walter, Wolfgang.