Christopher Ehret
Christopher Ehret | |
|---|---|
| Born | 27 July 1941 |
| Died | 25 March 2025 (aged 83) Thousand Oaks, California |
| Occupations | Historian, linguist |
| Spouse | Patricia Ehret |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Northwestern University |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Main interests | Afroasiatic languages, Nilo-Saharan languages, historical linguistics |
| Notable works | Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian) (2005) |
Christopher Paul Ehret (27 July 1941 – 25 March 2025) was an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics who was particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. He was a professor at UCLA for almost half a century and published a great multitude of works, including Reconstructing Proto-Afrasian (1995) and Ancient Africa (2023). He authored around seventy articles on a range of historical, linguistic, and anthropological subjects. These works include monographic articles on Bantu subclassification; on internal reconstruction in Semitic; on the reconstruction of proto-Cushitic and proto-Eastern Cushitic; and, with Mohamed Nuuh Ali, on the classification of the Somali languages.
Ehret contributed to a number of encyclopedias on African topics and on world history, such as Volume III of UNESCO General History of Africa book series for which he wrote a chapter on the East African interior.