Customer Reviews

Beginner's Basque (Hippocrene Beginner's)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

I have seen this book in the store and the library, but do not own a copy. HOWEVER, the reason I am adding a 5-star review is to correct a wrong inflicted on this author by a supposed Basque expert with apparently very low ethics and credibility herself.

The reviewer named Laka gave this book a 1-star rating even though she admits she has never read it. She is basing her "review" on a misunderstanding. She thinks the author referred to her name Itziar as masculine when she is a woman and that is apparently a common woman's name in the Basque country. What a stupid reason to give a book you have never seen a low grade.

In reality, it was NOT the author who referenced Itziar as masculine, but another online reviewer (who was being complimentary of her, I might add). The author of this book makes no mention of this Itziar Laka anywhere. He has been wrongly accused by an ignorant college professor.

A reader posted a comment to her bad review trying to alert her to her error. I went further and tracked down her e-mail and sent her a polite note explaining her error. She has ignored these and let her 1-star review stand. Thus the reason for my 5-star effort to make up for her error.

Hope this all makes sense. It's a good book from all I can tell and considering the dearth of materials for Basque, we should be thankful it exists at all.

I am going to add another 5 star rating, to counterbalance the absurd, juvenile, misdirected rant by Professor Laka. I originally commented on this, but the erroneous review was not changed. Another reader contacted her directly, but still there was no response. There should be some mechanism on Amazon for removing such reviews. I know that Professor Laka is more meticulous about the intricacies of Basque grammar than she is about reading book reviews.

Overall this is one of the best books available for learning Basque at a reasonable price. The point of any such beginner text is first and foremost to gain confidence in the overall structure of a language and (later) to begin your own linguistic synthesis - this book does a good job at exposing the reader to grammatical structure without being overly cumbersome. The only point of contention I have is the rather unnatural tone of the dialogues. For example, in the first chapter:

Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy.
Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl.
My name is Bernard, I am Johanna's brother.
My name is Johanna, I am Bernard's sister.
Johanna is a nice name, your name is nice.
Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too.
I am very glad!
See you.

It's as though the author is just trying to incorporate as much vocabulary as possible into a dialogue with little regard for the fluidity or nature of realistic speech.

i looked very hard when buying this book, i saw that it had some less then stellar reviews but it seemed that most people thought it was the best option. i hope that is not true, ive since found some good sites that have much more in depth explanations, but the selection of books is lacking.

this book's main problem is that it doesn't know what kind of book it is. it starts as a simple phrase book but them immediately tries to become a grammar lesson as well, it gives you small doses of grammar in horrible orders and doesn't get into sufficient depth on anything. in my opinion if you're going to give me grammar info then it needs to be detailed to the point where i can grasp how the language actually works. this book leaves me with too many questions and i have no basque speaking friends to help clarify, i have even read some reviews claiming that it is just dead wrong, i believe one of the reviews on this site is from an actual euskara who says that this book didn't know her name was a common females name

if you are really interested in this beautiful language i recommend web searches, i have found some pretty decent sites and on google books there is a book by alan king that is not quite so horribly slapped together

kaixo!

I never received the Book!!
You charge me the aamount and after I received a credit, but I lost some amount with the different exchange rates.
I hate it!!!!

The author of this book makes reference to my online grammar of Basque (just type Basque grammar in your favourite search engine and you'll find it free in the internet): the author thanks "...itziar laka for his examples..." (just see below in the summary of the book).
Two remarks:
(1) Do please never refer to a person whose gender you don't know assuming maleness; througout my academic life I have been transformed into a man by strangers a few times; it is most disturbing, and makes women even less visible than we already are.
(2) I happen to be a woman; anyone familiar with Basque culture, not even necessarily a speaker of the language knows that Itziar is a very stereotipycal female name among us (Itziar is in fact a very common and widespread Basque name, inside and outside the Basque Country, just type it in your search engine again). The fact that the author of a Basque grammar does not know this makes it extremely doubtful (or alternatively awfully surprising) that the material is either reliable or first-hand, or even both.