Re: Basque case usage (was: Re: Polysynthetic Languages)

En réponse à Isidora Zamora :


>Many thanks to you and to John Cowan for trying to expalin this
>phenomenon.  I wonder if the French example is similar to the way we will
>insert "you know" into an English sentence at times when the information
>given is definitely not information already known to the hearer?  As in:
>"And, you know, I really made him regret how he treated me."  (When all new
>information is being related to the hearer.)  The purpose of the "you know"
>seems to be to draw the hearer in by referring to him.
It's similar, but since it's a full phrase it has quite a different effect 
(French does that with "tu sais", and it doesn't have exactly the same effect).


>Someone mentioned here the other week that Japanese is *extremely*
>left-branching.
It is indeed :) .



>How'd you come to learn Basque, BTW?
I actually don't know that much Basque. I just read about the language and 
found it interesting, so I bought a small book about the Basques and it 
happened to contain a small grammar of the Basque language. Nearly 
everything I know about the language comes from that booklet.


>Thank you very much.  Someday, after I have re-educated myself in
>real-world linguistics, I hope  that I will not need to ask very basic
>questions like this that I should already know the answers to :-)  (I mean,
>seriously, I have an undergraduate degree in linguistics, and I have to ask
>what a comitative case is because I was never taught.  That's
>embarassing.  At least my phonetics and phonolgy are better than my syntax.)
I've heard Chomsky did quite some damage indeed :)) .


>Could you (or Rob Nierse) give me an example of the use of the inessive
>case vs. the locative genitive in Basque so that I can try to really grasp
>what the difference in usage is?
I'll let Rob come up with an example (I don't have one). But I can already 
tell that the Basque inessive is purely spatial and cannot be used to 
complete nouns, while the locative genitive is used exclusively to complete 
nouns.


>How many cases are there in Basque?  So far I've heard mentioned the
>ergative, absolutive, dative, possessive genitive, locative genitive,
>comitative, inessive, and instrumental.  Are there more?
Basque has 12 to 14 cases depending on how you count. The different cases 
are: absolutive, ergative, instrumental, dative, possessive genitive, 
comitative, destinative, locative genitive, inessive, adlative, ablative, 
partitive. The adlative has also two derivations: its main form is in -ra, 
but it has a form in -rantz called "directive" ("in the direction of") and 
a form in -raino called "terminative" ("up to"). Also, the destinative is 
normally in -tzat and means "instead of", but also has a form in -entzat 
meaning "in the interest of, for (beneficiary). But those two forms, AFAIK, 
are not counted as separated cases, unlike the derivations of the adlative. 
The Basque declination is mostly agglutinative, but it has some strange 
features, like the necessity of adding -ta- between the root and the case 
ending in spatial cases when the noun is *not* a spatial noun (i.e. doesn't 
describe a place) in the indefinite declination, or the fact that nouns 
inflect for number only in the definite declination (through the definite 
article affix which is -a in the singular and -e in the plural). The 
indefinite declension is unmarked for number (if you need to indicate 
number of an indefinite noun, you need to add some thing like an adjective 
equivalent of "some" or "one").

If you want to know more about Basque, http://www.ehu.es/grammar/index.htm 
is quite a good online grammar, although it uses a somewhat different 
nomenclature from mine. For instance, it considers only some of the cases 
I've presented as true cases. The others it calls "postpositions". Since 
Basque is agglutinative, the distinction is thin and both descriptions have 
their merits and drawbacks. Also, it calls Basque a "free order language" 
and give many examples of free order. However, all examples I've seen 
outside this grammar are strictly SOV, and nearly never go away from this 
pattern. So I don't know if you can call Basque really a "free order 
language". If you count in all the spoken utterances of people, I think any 
language could be called "free order language". After all, it's one of the 
characteristics of spoken language to be driven more by necessity of 
communication than by grammar rules. So things like word order can be 
forgotten when it helps communication and context keeps the meaning clear. 
Even Spoken Japanese allows noun phrases after the verb. That doesn't make 
it a "free order language".

Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.