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.
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-Albanianpalimpsest 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”.
1977: The syntax of infinitival formations in the Indo-European languages. (Europäische Hochschulschriften, 21/3), 360 pp.; Frankfurt, Bern, Las Vegas: Lang 1978. Dissertation
1990: Iranica Armeno-Iberica. A study of Iranian loan words in Armenian and Georgian, 451 + 389 pp.; Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences 1993. Inaugural dissertation.
2007: Gippert, Jost / Sarjveladze, Zurab / Kajaia, Lamara: The Old Georgian Palimpsest Codex Vindobonensis georgicus 2, edited by Jost Gippert in co-operation with Zurab Sarjveladze and Lamara Kajaia, 368 pp.; Turnhout: Brepols 2007.
2008: Gippert, Jost / Schulze, Wolfgang / Aleksidze, Zaza / Mahé, Jean-Pierre: The Caucasian Albanian Palimpsests of Mount Sinai, 2 vols., XXIV + 530 pp.; Turnhout: Brepols 2009.
2010: Gippert, Jost / Schulze, Wolfgang / Aleksidze, Zaza / Mahé, Jean-Pierre: The Caucasian Albanian Palimpsests of Mount Sinai. Vol. III: The Armenian Layer, edited by Jost Gippert., 220 pp.; Turnhout: Brepols 2010.
