Beginner's Basque (Hippocrene Beginner's)

Rating:
Summary: Another fine beginner's course from Hippocrene
Review: I have several of the Hippocrene books, such as the beginner's book on Arabic and their Spanish Grammar, which is the best brief grammar of Spanish that I have, and their language books are some of the best values out there considering the quality and features you get for the price.

This is another fine book from Hippocrene on Basque, or Euskara, as the Basques call it, a language that is uniquely different from the other European languages. Basque is what linguists call an ergative language, unlike most Indo-European languages. In fact, Basque is the only ergative language in Europe. In ergative languages, the subject is marked with an agentive prefix or postfix, so that the direct object of a transitive verb has the same case as the subject of an intransitive verb. This is what is called the ergative case, and its case marker is different from the absolutive case for subjects of transitive verbs.

There are three grammatical cases in Basque, the ergative, absolutive, and dative, although there is something that could be called the vocative, too. And there is something called the partitive although it is not a true grammatical case since it has a semantic meaning and not a pure grammatical function. The ergative case is marked with what is called an "epenthetic" k at the end of the word. Epenthetic letters occur in Basque when certain word syllables or word morphomes adjacent to each are forbidden, and so an extra letter is inserted in between.

One odd aspect of Basque transitive verbs is known as "weather predicates." A transitive verb, for those whose grammar is a little rusty, is one that takes a direct object, as opposed to an intransitive verb, which doesn't. For example, In the sentence, John died, "died" is an intransitive verb. In the sentence "John threw the ball to Richard," "threw" is the transitive verb and "ball" is the direct object, since it's receiving the action. Richard is the indirect object.

So in Basque, one can say,

Gorbeian elurra egiten du neguan
'In Gorbea, it snows in the winter'
(literally: 'In Gorbea, (it) makes (a) snow in winter')

(I thank Itziar Laka of the University of the Basque Country for this example and information on weather predicates from his Basque or Euskara webpage.)

What this shows is that there are no true weather verbs in Euskara. Rather, weather predicates are composed of the verb "egin," 'to make, do,' and the corresponding weather noun in a determined noun phrase, which is declined in the absolutive case.

Basque also has several other unique features among the Indo-European languages. It lacks the passive voice, and another oddity is that there are no reflexive pronouns such as myself/himself/herself/ourselves/themselves, although it has the standard set of pronouns. In an interesting article on Basque, Jon Patrick, a professor of psycholinguistics, points out, "Generally it can be said that Euskara (or Basque) has a limited vocabulary but a comprehensive set of grammar rules that makes language generation a highly constructive/creative act, whereas English relies on an extensive vocabulary to provide a breadth of expression. To my mind this feature makes Euskara a more powerful language than English, for example, one word in Euskara can have up to 458,653 different forms just using up to 2 levels of recursion of the standard suffixes."

So Basque is a fascinating and even unique language among the many more famous European languages, and I wanted to include the above information in my review to perhaps pique your curiousity and motivate you to learn a little more about Basque if only for that, and this is an excellent beginner's book that should serve you very well in that regard. Each chapter will help you progressively build your Basque skill, and contains vocabulary building lists, discussions of the grammar, and exercises and drills to reinforce the concepts presented in the test. The grammar is presented as it is need to understand what is going on in the conversations and phrases, so it's not a rigorous approach to the grammar, but it's fine for a beginner's book like this. But if you're like me and you want a more systematic treatment of the grammar, you'll probably supplement this book with a real grammar book on Basque on the side.

Hence, throughout the book, you'll find discussions on such topics as inflections or declensions of nouns and adjectives, verb conjugations and how to form the present, past, future, and conditional of verbs, and other topics on grammar. So overall, another excellent beginer's language book from Hippocrene. Once you've mastered this book you should be ready to go on to the intermediate level in your Basque studies.