Re: Basque bizarreries (was: Conland Digest etc.)

>Of course I didn't want to say that you should define
>a table as masculine or feminine: this is French
>oddity. I rather thought like in English: masculine,
>feminine, neutral. I think that very many languages
>mark the gender, so my question was: why is it not so
>in Basque ? This is one of the points that make Basque
>*peculiar* (and hence interesting, of course), from my
>point of view.
Why _should_ it mark gender? English doesn't mark gender
either, does it? Is English *peculiar* then? Neither
do Chinese or Japanese, nor many other languages for
that matter, so maybe the peculiar ones are those who
*do* grammaticalize gender and not the other way round.

Besides, Basque _does_ grammaticalize gender in one
instance: the informal 2nd person singular verb forms,
e.g. "duk" (thou man hast it) vs. "dun" (thou woman
hast it).


>> >What's very interesting is the Number; there is
>> >Singular, Plural, no Dual, but an Indefinite
>> Number:
>>
>> I'd rather say that there are two definitions:
>> Indefinite and Definite, and
>> number is marked on the noun only in the definite.
Yes, the plural marker -k must be attached to a determiner,
either the definite -a (-> -ak) or a demonstrative (hau
-> hauek, hori -> horiek, etc.). You cannot attach it
to a bare "mugagabe" ('boundless' or indefinite) form.

Quoting from the website I mention below:

"The specification for number in the Noun Phrase belongs
in the Determiner category and it is morphologically
inseparable from it. Therefore, determinerless Noun
Phrases cannot be marked for number even if they are
semantically plural. Only Noun Phrases that are headed
by an overt determiner can have plural marking on them."


>> In the indefinite, you
>> simply use separate marks (and indeed, Basque often
>> uses "bat": "one" with
>> the indefinite to indicate it's singular). Nothing
>> fancy actually.
The semantic connotation of 'bat' when used as a determiner
is the one expressed in English by "some, a certain":
"txori bat" -> "some bird", "a certain bird". In this usage,
"bat" admits pluralization into "batzuk": "txori batzuk"
-> "some (certain) birds".

Note also that, often, "a bird" would be expressed in
Basque as "txoria", i.e. using the 'definite' determiner
regardless of the actual semantic indefiniteness, because
in most instances Basque grammar requires a determined
syntagm for grammaticality, so equating Basque -a with
English "the" is an inaccurate simplification. You can
check this website for more details about this 'indefinite'
usage of -a:  http://www.ehu.es/grammar/gram2.htm

Some quotes from it:

"There are many other syntactic environments where this
determiner is used despite the fact that the phrase it
heads is not definite [...] Many predicative atributes
in Euskara require the determiner -a. [...] Generic
sentences always require the determiner -a, whether
their subjects are singular or plural. [...] Indefinite
objects and subjects, which can often appear determinerless
in many languages, also require the determiner -a. [...]
There are no cases in Euskara were objects can appear as
bare Noun Phrases, regardless of number."


>> > In
>> >counterpart, no Gender, so shall we suppose that
>> the
>> >Basque think that the difference between man and
>> woman
>> >is too insignifiant to be mentioned ?
Do the English think the difference between man and
woman is too insignificant to be mentioned? You know,
it is not mentioned in "who", "person", "teacher", etc.

Cheers,
Javier