Basque grammar
This article provides a sketch of Basque grammar. Basque is the language of the Basque people of the Basque Country or Euskal Herria, which borders the Bay of Biscay in Western Europe.
Noun phrases
The Basque noun phrase is structured quite differently from those in most Indo-European languages.Articles, determiners and quantifiers
and quantifiers play a central role in Basque noun phrase structure. Articles are best treated as a subset of the determiners.The articles -a, -ak, -ok, -ik, demonstratives hau, hori, hura and some of the quantifiers follow the noun they determine or quantify.
Other determiners and quantifiers, including beste 'other', the interrogatives and numerals above one or two precede the noun.
A normal noun phrase with a common noun as head must contain exactly one determiner or exactly one quantifier but not both, as in the above examples. However, the numerals may co-occur with a determiner.
The items beste 'other' and guzti 'all' do not 'fill' the determiner or quantifier position and therefore require an article, other determiner or quantifier.
The article -a, -ak acts as the default determiner, obligatory with a common noun in the absence of another determiner or quantifier.
- etxea 'house'
- etxeak 'houses'
- Nola esaten da euskaraz "house"? — "Etxea". 'How do you say "house" in Basque? — "Etxe".'
- etxerik 'any house'
- Ba al daukazu etxerik? 'Have you got a house?'
- Hemen ez dago etxerik. 'There is no house here, There aren't any houses here.'
- Not: *Hemen ez daude etxerik. 'There are no houses here.'
- Andoni 'Anthony'
- Tokio 'Tokyo'
- Wikipedia 'Wikipedia'
- ni 'I, me'
- nor? 'who?'
- Lehendakari izendatuko dute. 'They will appoint him president.'
- Bilbora joan zen irakasle. 'He went to Bilbao as a teacher.'
- eskuz 'by hand'
- sutan 'on fire'
Genitive and adjectival constructions
- Koldoren etxea 'Koldo's house'
- nire etxea 'my house'
- basoko etxea 'house in the forest'
The head noun of a possessed noun phrase may be omitted. In this case the article or other determiner is still retained, now attached to the genitival element.
Noun phrases are turned into genitives by the addition of one of two genitive case suffixes, -en or -ko.
- ni 'I, me' → nire 'my'
Adjectives
s, in contrast to adjectival expressions, immediately follow the head noun but precede any article, determiner or quantifier.When adjectives, adjectivals or genitives are used as predicates, they usually take the article.
Number
Basque has three numbers: singular, unmarked and plural. Unmarked appears in declension when it is not necessary to specify singular or plural, such as because it is a proper name or is next to a determiner or a quantifier. Plural markers occur in two parts of Basque grammar: in some pronouns, determiners and quantifiers and in argument indices on verbs. For nouns, it depends on how the article -a/-ak is considered: as an enclitic, nouns would be number-neutral, as a suffix, nouns would be three-numbered. An unarticled noun such as etxe rarely occurs alone and normally appears within a noun phrase containing either a determiner or a quantifier, its number is likely to be indicated by this element:Transitive verbs add a suffix, for example -it-, when the object of the verb is plural.
Most determiners, including the article, have distinct singular and plural forms. Most quantifiers do not show such morphological variation, but many have intrinsically plural lexical meanings.
Singular:
- -a
- hau, hori, hura
- bat
- -ak, -ok
- hauek, horiek, haiek
- batzuk
- bi, hiru, lau...
- zein etxe? 'which house?' or 'which houses?'
- zenbat esne? 'how much milk?'
- zenbat etxe? 'how many houses?'
Pronouns and adverbs
Personal pronouns
differentiate three persons and two numbers. Zu must once have been the second-person plural pronoun but is now only the polite singular, having partially displaced the original second-person singular pronoun hi, now a markedly familiar form of address. Zuek represents a repluralised derivative of zu and is now the only second-person plural pronoun.The function of third-person personal pronouns may be filled by any of the demonstrative pronouns or their emphatic counterparts in ber-.
Besides these ordinary personal pronouns, there are emphatic ones, whose forms vary considerably between dialects: the first-person singular is neu, nerau, neroni or nihaur.
Demonstrative pronouns
The demonstrative determiners may be used pronominally. There are also emphatic demonstrative pronouns beginning with ber-.It has often been noted that in traditional usage, there is often an explicit correlation between the three degrees of proximity in the demonstrative forms and the grammatical persons, such that hau is made to correspond to ni, hori to hi/zu and so on. One manifestation of this is the now old-fashioned mode of addressing persons in social positions commanding special respect using third-person verb forms and, for the personal pronoun, the second-degree intensive demonstrative berori.
Other pronouns and correlative adverbs
Further forms
- All the demonstrative pronouns and adverbs may be extended by the suffix -xe which lends further emphasis: hauxe, hementxe, honelaxe, oraintxe.
- The pronouns can all be declined in any case. The personal and demonstrative pronouns exhibit allomorphy between absolutive and non-zero cases. The adverbs can be adjectivalised by addition of -ko, and some can also take other locative suffixes.
- There are two further series of indefinites, as illustrated by edonor, edonon... and nornahi, zernahi..., respectively; both series may be translated as 'whoever, wherever...' or 'anyone, anywhere...'.
- Negative pronouns and adverbs consist of the negative polarity series together with ez 'no' or as part of a negative sentence: inor ez 'nobody', Ez dut inor ezagutzen 'I don't know anybody' = 'I know nobody'.
Declension
Cases
Basque noun phrases are followed by a case suffix, which specifies the relation between the noun phrase and its clause. The most basic cases are shown here, for convenience divided into three main groups: nuclear, local and others.Case suffixes are attached to whatever element comes last in the noun phrase according to the rules already given. The different forms or "declensions" of each case suffix given in the following tables are selected in accordance with the nature of the nominal element to which the case ending is attached, as will be explained below.
Sets of case forms ("declensions")
The four sets of forms, labelled 1 to 4 in the preceding tables, have the following uses and characteristics:From the above, it may be deduced that the essential formal characteristics of the Basque cases are as shown in the following table:
Declension of personal pronouns, demonstratives and ''bat, batzuk''
For the most part, the application of the suffixes to any word in the language is highly regular. In this section are the main exceptions:Personal pronouns and demonstratives display some irregularities in declension. The personal pronouns ni, hi, gu, zu form their possessive genitive by adding -re rather than -ren: nire, hire, gure, zure. They are the pronominal possessives:
As has been seen, the demonstratives each have three stems: one for the absolutive singular, another for all other singular cases, and one for the plural, all cases.