25.1678, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Jost Gippert

Thu Apr 10 14:39:47 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1678. Thu Apr 10 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1678, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Jost Gippert

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Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 10:39:14
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Jost Gippert

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Please welcome our new Featured Linguist Jost Gippert! Jost was born in
Western Germany and is currently working at the University of Frankfurt. Find
out below what led him to linguistics and why he chose this path.

How I Became a Linguist by Jost Gippert 

“Buenos dias”, “buenas noches” – this was the first words in a foreign
language I heard in my life, as a three-year old boy growing up in developing
post-war Western Germany, where the first gastarbeiters had arrived from
Spain. Fascinated by the strange sounds, I tried to get to know some more
languages, the only opportunity being TV courses of English and French – there
was no foreign language education for pre-teen school children in Germany yet
in those days. The first foreign language I had to learn “officially”, in
secondary school, was Latin – fascinating as well, not so much for its sounds
(as nobody “spoke” it) but for its structure, with case endings, perfect
subjunctives, and the accusativus cum infinitivo. Then, when I was eleven
years old, my father gave me a textbook of Russian he had received for
evaluation (as a school teacher of German, so it made no sense for him). Yet
another fascinating experience: first, I had to deal with a different script
here (actually, not for the first time, I had learned the Greek alphabet long
before, but not so much the language); and second, the textbook came along
with a disc which contained the first five or so lessons, spoken by well
articulating native speakers (of course there were no “normal” Russian
speaking people around on our side of the Iron Curtain then) – I still have
their voices in my ears today after listening to them for many hours in those
times. Finally, when I was 15 years old, I had the opportuny to apply what I
had learned from the discs, on a one-week trip to Moscow, which turned out to
be one of the biggest disappointments in my “early linguistic career”: I had
to realize that the “stagy” pronunciation of the speakers on the disc
(presumably all elder emigrants from Tzarist St. Petersburg) had barely
anything in common with the colloquial Muscovite slang with all its vowel
reductions etc. I was confronted with on that trip. Nevertheless, I did not
give up – after four days I had accustomed myself to that sufficiently for an
intriguing conversation with a young lady of my age (whom I never met again,
alas!).

Russian was decisive indeed for my choice to become a linguist, not so much
because of the (delayed) success in speaking it but rather because of its
stunning similarities with Latin: common words like luna “moon”, common
grammatical features as in feminines ending in -a, common preverbs like pro-,
etc. Even though I had heard nothing concrete about the parentage and affinity
of Indo-European languages at school, it was clear to me that Comparative
Linguistics was “my” subject when I took up my university studies at Marburg,
and it has remained so down to the present day, in both its senses: as a
discipline investigating genetic relations of languages, and as a discipline
trying to classify them according to their typological characteristics. After
a “career” of more than 40 years, I can tell for sure that the more languages
you get acquainted with, the less you will be deterred by strange sound
systems (and sound changes), anteablatives, or antipassives, and yet every new
language will be fascinating for you, especially if you try not to miss the
cultural background behind it.

Jost Gippert

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1678	
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