Jost Gippert (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːst ˈgɪpʰɐt]; born 12 March 1956 in Winz-Niederwenigern, later merged to Hattingen) is a German linguist, Caucasiologist, author, and the professor for Comparative Linguistics at the Institute of Empirical Linguistics at the Goethe University of Frankfurt.[1]
In 1972, Gippert graduated from the Leibniz-Gymnasium in Essen, Germany. Having studied Comparative Linguistics, Indology, Japanese studies, and Chinese studies from 1972 to 1977 at the University of Marburg and the Free University of Berlin,[2] he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1977 on the basis of his work on the syntax of infinitival formations in Indo-European languages. From 1977 to 1990, he worked as a research fellow and held lectures at the universities of Berlin, Vienna and Salzburg. While being research assistant for Oriental Computational Linguistics in 1991, he habilitated at the University of Bamberg with his inaugural dissertation on the study of Iranian loanwords in Armenian and Georgian.
Since 1994, Gippert has been teaching Comparative Linguistics at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. He has been a member of the Gelati Science Academy (Georgia) since 1996, and of the department of “Language” at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2007.
In 1997, he was appointed the Honorary Professor of the Sulkhan Saba Orbeliani University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and, in 2009, he became Honorary Doctor at the Ivane Javakhishvili University also in Tbilisi, and was appointed Honorary Doctor at the Shota Rustaveli University in Batumi, Georgia, in 2013.
Since Gippert became a Professor of Comparative Linguistics, much of his research has focused on Indo-European languages, their history and etymology, as well as the general linguistic typology and especially the study of the languages of the Caucasus. Thanks to his dedication to the languages of the Caucasus, many international research projects have been undertaken in this area under his supervision. His research focuses on historical linguistics, linguistic typology, electronic text corpora, multimedia language documentation and electronic manuscript analysis.
Gippert is the founder and leader of the TITUS project (Thesaurus of Indo-European Texts and Languages).[3] Its goal, since its foundation in 1987, has been the full digital accessibility of textually recorded material of various Indo-European and adjacent languages. In 1999, he started the ARMAZI project (Caucasian Languages and Cultures: Electronic Documentation),[4] which aimed at a comprehensive collection of Caucasian language material. This project yielded the Georgian National Corpus (GNC). Since 2010, Gippert has been the head of the center “Digital Humanities in the State of Hesse: Integrated Processing and Analysis of Text-based Corpora” within the unit of the “Federal Offensive for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence” (LOEWE (project)). This center is a collaboration between the Goethe University of Frankfurt and the Technische Universität Darmstadt with additional support from the Goethe Museum, Frankfurt.
In the 1990s, Gippert turned his attention to Oriental manuscripts, working on projects with the goal of making them digitally accessible, e.g., the Tocharian manuscripts of the Berlin Turfan Collection. Furthermore, he edited works including the Caucasian-Albanian palimpsest manuscripts found on Mount Sinai. In 2009, he was a visiting scholar in the research group “Manuscript Cultures” at the University of Hamburg. In summer 2013, he visited the University of Hamburg again, as a Petra Kappert Fellow, participating in the compilation of the “Encyclopedia of Manuscript Cultures” and of the handbook “Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies”.
