Basque & Katzner's Languages of the World

I picked up _Languages of the World_ by Kenneth Katzner a few weeks ago.
It's an interesting, *very* breezy survey of world languages, probably not
really useful linguistically (the author works for the U.S. federal gov't)
.  In particular, I wish his phonological descriptions (which are very
anglocentric, perhaps not surprisingly) had used IPA instead of fuzzy
things like "There is both a soft r and a hard r" in Basque.  Which brings
me to my question: for those who know (something about) Basque, what the
heck is he talking about?  Trilled and non-trilled?  Trilled vs.
approximant?  Meep?

The other thing I like about this book, and the real reason I picked it up
even though I'm sort of skeptical of its academic usefulness, is the
samples of text that he includes.  Some are pretty uninteresting (yet
another biblical translation into whatever non-Indo-European language),
but there are some lovely poems/passages/script samples, including my
favourite Korean poem, Kim Seowol's "Chindallae" (azaleas), with
translations.

Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

Southern DOS: Y'all reckon?  (Yep/Nope)

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