Helmut Gipper

Helmut Gipper (born August 9, 1919 in Düren ; † June 13, 2005 in Münster ) was a German linguist and professor at the University of Bonn and the University of Münster .

Gipper passed the Abitur in Düren in 1938 , after which he did labor and military service from 1938–1946. As a prisoner of war he began his studies in 1944-45 at the camp college for prisoners of war, Crossville / Tennessee, before he began studying philosophy, Romance languages, English, German, art history and linguistics in Marburg in 1946 . He received his doctorate in 1950 in Marburg under Alwin Kuhn , went to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950 and went to Besançon as a lecturer the following year . As a research assistant in Bonn, he became a student of Leo Weisgerber from 1956 , the founder of content-related grammar, from whom he also completed his habilitation in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was a private lecturer in Bonn, then lecturer there, associate professor, scientific adviser and professor. In 1967 and 1969 he was visiting professor at the University of New Hampshire , USA. In 1972 he was appointed associate professor before he was appointed to the chair for general linguistics in Münster that same year, where he retired in 1985.

Gipper traveled to the Hopi Indians in northeast Arizona during his visiting professorships in New Hampshire in 1967 and 1969 to test Whorf's claim that these Indians had a remarkably different view of space-time; the Hopi verb is without tenses in the sense of the Indo-European languages and does not contain any temporal references. Gipper did not confirm this, but found the basic idea of ​​the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis correct, that the consciousness of the Hopis is structured differently than that of the Europeans. In 1972 he published his results with “Is there a linguistic principle of relativity?” According to which structures of the grammar of a language shape the consciousness and worldview of its speakers and influence their thinking, values ​​and actions. This strengthened his thesis of the a priori language that without language no development of consciousness is possible. In doing so, he follows his teacher Weisgerber, saying that words are not simply facts that can be taken over, but are only learned in their external form, the internal must first be developed mentally. What is thought and felt in addition to the names forms the experienced world of the speaker, the names form the external form for it. Communicating your own thoughts with the name is secondary.

Gipper also took part in the discussion about the spelling reform negatively .

Fonts

• Linguistic and spiritual metamorphoses in poem translations: A comparative language study. for clarification German-French Minds difference , Marburg 1950 [= dissertation]; also: Schwann, Düsseldorf 1966.
• (Ed.): Language, Key to the World. Fs. F. Leo Weisgerber , Schwann, Düsseldorf 1959.
• Building blocks for language content research: Newer language considerations in exchange with intellectual and Natural Science , Bonn 1961 [= habilitation thesis]; also: Schwann, Düsseldorf 1963.
• Thinking without language , Schwann, Düsseldorf 1971, ISBN 978-3-7895-0121-0 .
• Is there a linguistic principle of relativity? Investigations on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-10-826301-3 .
• with Peter Schmitter : Linguistics and philosophy of language in the age of romanticism: a contribution to the historiography d. Linguistics , Narr, Tübingen 1979, ISBN 978-3-87808-123-4 .
• Das Sprachapriori: Language as a prerequisite for human thought and knowledge , Frommann-Holzboog 1987, ISBN 978-3772809347 .
• The human being as a linguistic being: acquisition, possession, loss and damage to language from a linguistic perspective , Nodus, Münster 1992, ISBN 3-89323-234-6
• Co-author: Philosophical Anthropology of Modernism , Beltz, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 978-3-89547-075-2 .
• (with Hans Schwarz and co-workers :) Bibliographical manual for language content research . Opladen 1962-85. 4 vols., 4085 pages with 30744 titles. Several register volumes. (H. Franke, K. Franke, L. Kaczmarek) 1980, 1988, 1989.
• Ed .: Children on the way to language. On the process of language learning in the first three years of life. With 50 language diagrams . Düsseldorf 1985. (With Ch. Boving, U. Cron-Böngeler, S. Seupold, G. Niggemann, M. Rothaut)

Web links

• DEB biography Helmut Gipper
• Declaration by the professors of linguistics and literary studies 1998 on the spelling reform www.sprache.org/bvr/

literature

• Günther Heintz and Peter Schmitter (eds.): Collectanea philologica: Festschrift for Helmut Gipper on his 65th birthday , Baden-Baden 1985.