Jost Gippert

Born 12 March 1956 in Winz-Niederwenigern—a town that would later merge into Hattingen—Gippert trained as a linguist and turned his attention to the Caucasus, a region where language families tangle and ancient scripts survive in fragments. He became a Caucasiologist, a specialist in a field with few practitioners. That focus led him to manuscript studies, the close reading of old texts as physical objects. Now he holds the title of Senior Professor at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg, where the work is as much archaeology as linguistics.