Professor Helen Giunashvili

Helen Giunashvili is a researcher at G. Tsereteli Institute of Oriental Studies, Ilia State University in Tbilisi and is also affiliated to the Graduate School of the Methodology of the Humanities in Paris. She was educated first at I. Javakhishvili State University, Faculty of Oriental Studies and after, at the St. Petersburg  Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, where she took the postgraduate course and  did her Doctoral thesis on the subject “Personal Verbal Forms in Western Middle Iranian” (1993). Her researches mostly deal with cultural-linguistic interrelations of pre-Islamic Iran and Georgia. She is the author of more over 50 scientific publications.

Research interests: Historical grammar of Western Middle Iranian languages; Iranian-Georgian cultural-linguistic interference: Parthian and Middle Persian lexis  in Old Georgian; Structural-typological relation of Middle Persian with Old Georgian; Parthian and Middle Persian onomastics (proper names, ethnical names, geographic terminology) in Old Georgian; Scythian-Alanic onomastics in Kartvelian; Old Aramaic epigraphy of Georgia, linguistic-paleographic analysis; XVI-XVIII cc Persian and Georgian-Persian historical documents, their linguistic characteristics; Persian elements in the language of the Iranian Georgians (Fereidanian dialect).