Basque grammar
This article provides a grammar sketch of the Basque language, 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.Genitive and adjectival constructions
Adjectives
Number
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.| Reconstructed proto-system | Attested present-day system |
hi 'you ' zu 'you ' | hi 'you ' zu 'you ' zu-ek 'you ' |
The function of third-person personal pronouns may be filled by any of the demonstrative pronouns or their emphatic counterparts in ber-.
| Singular | Plural |
ni 'I/me' hi 'you ' zu 'you ' hau, hori, hura, bera 'he/him, she/her, it' | gu 'we/us' zuek 'you' hauek, horiek, haiek, berak, eurak... 'they/them' |
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-.| Singular | Plural | |
| Ordinary | hau 'this' hori 'that ' hura 'yon ' | hauek 'these' horiek 'those ' haiek 'yon ' |
| Intensive | berau 'this' berori 'that ' bera 'yonder ' | berauek 'these' beroriek 'those ' beraiek 'yonder ' |
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:| Set | Type | Comments | Examples |
| 1 | SINGULAR ARTICLE | Represent the combination of the singular article -a with the case suffixes. There is a formal absence of any trace of the -a- morpheme in the local cases, however. The -- in the local cases occurs after consonants. |
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| 2 | PLURAL ARTICLE | Represent the combination of the plural article -ak with the case suffixes. Notice the pre-suffixal plural article allomorphs -eta- and -e-. | |
| 3 | NO ARTICLE | Used in the absence of an article: when another determiner or quantifier is employed or occasionally when there is none at all. The -- and --, shown with some suffixes, appear following consonants and vowels, respectively. | |
| 4 | PROPER NOUNS | Used with proper nouns. They are identical to set 3 except in the local cases. This set contains the most basic form of each case suffix. The local forms -dik and -go are used after a voiced consonant except r. |
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:
| Singular | Plural |
nire 'my' hire 'your ' zure 'your ' haren, beraren 'his, her, its bere 'his, her, its ' | gure 'our' zuen 'your' haien, beraien 'their' beren 'their ' |
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.
| Singular absolutive | Singular other | Plural absolutive | Plural other |
hau 'this' hori 'that' hura 'that ' bat 'one, a' | honek, honi, honetan... horrek, horri, horretan... hark, hari, hartan... batek, bati, batean... | hauek horiek haiek batzuk 'some' | hauek, hauei, hauetan... horiek, horiei, horietan... haiek, haiei, haietan... batzuek, batzuei, batzuetan... |
Animate local cases
As a rule, the local case suffixes given above are not used directly with noun phrases that refer to a person or an animal. An inessive, allative or ablative relation affecting such noun phrases may be expressed by using the suffixes inessive -gan, allative -gana, and ablative -gandik, affixed to either the possessive genitive or the absolutive: nigan 'in me', irakaslearengana 'to the teacher', zaldiengandik 'from the horses', haur horrengandik 'from that child', Koldorengana 'to Koldo'.Compound case forms
In addition to the basic case forms given above, further forms are found derived from them through the addition of further suffixes or extensions. Some of the additional forms provide for the expression of more nuanced relations; others have the same or similar meanings to the basic forms, with which they merely contrast stylistically or dialectally:| Basic case | Compound cases |
| ALLATIVE: -ra 'to' |
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| ABLATIVE: -tik 'from' | |
| COMITATIVE: -ekin 'with' | |
| BENEFACTIVE: -entzat 'for' |
Adjectival ''-ko''
The -ko suffix may be added to some case forms to make their syntactic function adjectival.| Case | Primary use | Adjectival use |
| Allative |
| |
| Instrumental | ||
| Benefactive |
Local cases with adverbs
The fourth set is local case suffixes incorporated into the place adverbs, which gives these following forms:Many other adverbs may be adjectivalised with -ko. Some may take certain other case suffixes, particularly ablative -tik/-dik: atzotik 'since yesterday', urrundik 'from far away'.
Postpositions
Basque postpositions are items of sufficient lexical substance and grammatical autonomy to be treated as separate words and specifying relations. They are so called because they follow the word or phrase whose relation they express.The most typical Basque postpositions are built on nominal structures: -aren gainean 'on top of' centres on the word gain 'top', but not all postpositional nuclei consist of nouns that can be used independently of the postpositional construction in which they participate.
One subset of postpositions that express spatial relationships have a lexical stem whose syntactic behaviour is roughly noun-like but is limited to a much narrower range of possible patterns. Here are some Basque relationals:
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Comparison
In English, the comparative and superlative of many adjectives and adverbs are formed by adding the suffixes -er and -est respectively. Basque adjectives and adverbs similarly take such suffixes, but there are three morphologically derived degrees of comparison. From handi 'big' is handiago 'bigger', handien ' biggest' and handiegi 'too big':
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Occasionally, such suffixes may be added to other word forms: from gora 'up' can be formed gorago, 'more up', i.e. 'higher'. Just as English has a few irregular forms of comparison such as better and best, so does Basque: on 'good' but hobe 'better'. Other ways of comparing quality or manner, in both Basque and English, involve using a separate word, such as hain handi 'so big'.
Special words are used to compare quantities, such as gehiago 'more', gehien ' most', gehiegi 'too much, too many'. They follow the noun quantified: liburu gehiago 'more books', gatz gehiegi 'too much salt', and hainbeste 'so much, so many', which precedes the noun: hainbeste diru 'so much money'. All of them can also be used adverbially : Ez pentsatu hainbeste! 'Don't think so much!'.
Comparisons may involve reference to a standard : compare English is easier to English is easier than Basque. English puts the word than in front of the standard. In Fish is as expensive as meat, meat is the standard, indicated by the second as. Comparisons of the as...as type are called equative. With superlatives, as in Donostia is the prettiest city in the Basque Country, on the other hand, the Basque Country is not really a standard but a domain or range within which the superlative applies. The structures used in such comparisons in Basque are as follows ; the word orders shown are the most common and considered basic, but certain variations are also possible.
Verbs
Although several verbal categories are expressed morphologically, periphrastic tense formations predominate. Up to three arguments can be indexed morphologically on single verb forms, and further sets of synthetic allocutive forms make for an even more complex morphology. The verb is also an area of the language subject to a fair amount of dialectal variation. The complexity of this subject and its traditional centrality in descriptions of Basque grammar made it the subject of a separate article.Syntax
Information structure
The focus rule and the topic rule
Basque word order is largely determined by the notions of focus and topic which are employed to decide how to "package" or structure the propositional content in utterances. Focus is a feature that attaches to a part of a sentence considered to contain the most important information, the "point" of the utterance. Thus in different discourse contexts the same sentence can take the focus on different parts, giving rise to different grammatical forms. Topic, on the other hand, refers to a part of a sentence that serves to put the information it contains into context, i.e. to establish "what we are talking about". Basque word order involves in a very basic way two rules, the "focus rule" and the "topic rule", as follows:- Focus rule: Whichever constituent of a sentence is in focus immediately precedes the verb.
- Topic rule: A topic is emphasised by placing it at the beginning of the sentence.
Basque is sometimes called an SOV language, but as one can see, the order of elements in the Basque sentence is not rigidly determined by grammatical roles and has to do with other criteria. In Basque the SOV is more common and less marked than the OSV order, although each is appropriate in different contexts. That is to say, it is more common and less marked for the subject to be topic and for the object to be in focus than vice versa. This may be explained by intrinsic qualities of the concepts "subject" and "object". It is compatible with the cross-linguistic tendency for topichood to be a characteristic feature of prototypical subjects, for example.
Verbal focus
A possibility seemingly not taken into account by the above focus rule, which states that the focused element precedes the verb, is the circumstance wherein the verb itself is in focus. One situation in which this occurs is a clause with no non-verbal constituents, only perhaps a topic-subject, as in 'He knows' or 'John is coming'. Of course there may be other constituents, as long as none of them are focused, e.g. 'She has money'. This type of sentence is sometimes described as one in which what is in focus is not so much the verb as the affirmation of the predicate; i.e. 'She has money' does not really stand in contrast to, say, 'She eats money', but only to 'She doesn't have money'. For the present practical purpose this distinction may be ignored and the term "verbal focus" will be applied to such cases.The most notable verb-focusing strategy in Basque grammar is use of the affirmative prefix ba-. Attached to a synthetically conjugated finite verb, this has the effect of putting that verb in focus, thereby implying that whatever precedes the verb is not in focus. Thus the use of ba- looks as if it blocks application of the general focus rule which assigns focus to an element in pre-verbal position.
The affirmative use of ba- is normally used with synthetic finite forms, thus also John badator or Badator John 'John is coming', Badu dirua 'She has money'. In most varieties of Basque, affirmative ba- is not so used with compound tenses or compound verbs, however.
To place a compound verb form in focus, it may be enough to place the main sentence stress on the first component of the verbal compound expression. Here it seems that the auxiliary part of the expression is treated as representing the "verb" in the general focus rule, thereby predictably throwing the focus onto the preceding component, which is now the main verb. In western dialects an alternative procedure used to emphasise the placement of focus on the verb is to make this a complement of the verb egin 'do'.
Further observations on focus and topic
There are certain exceptions to the general focus rule:Systematic exceptions apart, focus assignment is an obligatory feature of Basque clauses. Because it is obligatory and automatic, such focus assignment need not be pragmatically marked and does not necessarily signify emphatic focusing or foregrounding. This observation is particularly applicable when focus is assigned in accordance with predictable or prototypical patterns, such as when the direct object takes the focus position in a transitive clause, or when the verb is formally focused in an intransitive clause.
In some varieties or styles of Basque, e.g. in poetic diction, one may achieve more emphatic focus by inverting the usual verb-auxiliary order: Txakurrek hezurrak dituzte jaten. In ordinary colloquial usage many speakers do not allow this, but some allow other such "inversions", e.g. with compound verbs, e.g. normal Irakaslearekin hitz egingo dut 'I'll speak to the teacher' versus more marked Irakaslearekin egingo dut hitz.
A topic may be backgrounded by placement at the end of a sentence rather than at the beginning, e.g. Hezurrak jaten dituzte txakurrek, roughly 'They eat bones, dogs'; so also Ez dakit, nik 'I don't know', where nik is no doubt a topic of sorts since if it weren't there would be no need to mention it at all.
Clause-initial verbs
Although the following restrictions on the placement of verbs within the clause are the outcome of the various rules already given, it may be useful to summarise those restrictions here.Negation
Questions
There are two question markers: al for straightforward yes-no questions, and ote for tentative questions of any kind. Both al and ote are placed immediately in front of the finite verb form. The question marker al is not used pan-dialectally. In some dialects the same function is performed by a suffix -a attached to the finite verb form. Still other dialects lack either interrogative al or interrogative -a.
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