(from left to right: Bernard Outtier, Jost Gippert, Winfried Boeder and Darejan Tvaltvadze), 2009 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, 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 “Languages” 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. Since 2020 Gippert is the Senior Professor at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the
University of Hamburg Jost Gippert (on the right), 2013 == Digital humanities ==