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Bernardo Atxaga. Esos cielos. 1996. 139 pp.

The night before I decided to study a little Basque, I had a dream that I was studying Basque and having to decline the word "Garmendia." Upon waking I felt I should study Basque--something that had never occured to me before. I was curious to what Garmendia was, the term that had appeared in my dream, and it turned out to be the real name of Atxaga, the most prominent Basque novelist of today.

I read this in Spanish, of course. A woman who has been in jail for 4 years for being a part of ETA or a splinter group thereof takes a bus from Barcelona to Bilbao. She has very little to get back to, since she's no longer in ETA. It's very well plotted, almost too well put together--the way the two plots--the events of the return home itself and all the other information about her past--are put together.

Frantziako Gobernuak lan denbora erreformatzeko lege proiektua aurkeztu du. Legezko lan denbora 35 orenekoa dela ziurtatu du Xavier Bertrand Frantziako Lan Ministroak. Aldi berean, gaur aurkeztu duten lege proiektuarekin, 35 orenak "indargabetzeko azken etapa" martxan dela azpimarratu du Nicolas Sarkozyk..

Here will be my first attempt to read something in Basque.

Franzia + suffix -ko. The French Government [ergative case; subject of transitive sentence]



lan is work. I'm guessing erreformatzeko lege proiektua is a not yet passed reform law. denbora is time.

oren is hour. It appears in several grammatical forms here: orenekoa / orenak. Something about the 35 hour work week, I'm guessing.

aukezstu du is the verb, past tense.

ziurtatu du made sure of...

azpimarratu du emphasized

azken the end

etapa stage, period of time.

I get the sense the French minister of labor is proposing to end the 35 hour work week. Unfortunately I don't have a good dictionary. I've only been studying Basque for 5 days.

The Lorca copy-editing is coming back on July 7, giving me a little over a week to write as much as I can of an article on Gamoneda and thoroughly learn Basque. (Maybe just learn the conjugations of the verbs to have and to be.) Akiko is in A Coruña for a conference on Pardo Bazán. Julia is reading The Da Vinci Code of all things.

Basque (Euskara) is great for the morphemes, especially the suffixes. The way I see it a language has a certain amount of tasks it might think of doing. Indicating spacial and temporal relationships; gender, person, and number. And it has different ways it might think of doing those things. Basque likes doing many of these things by attaching morphemes to the end of words and phrases. So the make things plural it attaches -ak to the end. (But -ak is also a morpheme used to mark the singular ergative case.)

The definite article is -a attached to last word of the NP. If you take a word like neska [girl] that already ends in a, you don't need the article, it's just neska and neska in both forms, as opposed to mutil and mutila.

Basque is not big on gender. No separate pronouns for female and male subjects, [unlike nosostros /nosotras or él/ella.] Nouns don't have grammatical genders.

The verbal system marks for perfective/imperfective aspect, past, present and future. Skipping ahead of myself there are different verb forms for ergative vs. absolutive and dative? There are not tons of conjugations to memorize, though, because most of these markings are done through the auxiliary verb + one or two forms of participle.

Phonology seems close to Castilian [Spanish] in some respects. There's always the theory that Castilian is the Romance dialect of people whose first language was Basque, or at least one that developed in proximity to Basque. I've been listening to the radio a bit over the internet to get a feel for it.

70% of teachers who study Basque [in the Basque country] in order to get certified as Basque-competent teachers do not do well enough on the test to qualify. Yet somehow I am stupidly overconfident about my ability to get a reading knowlege of it. At some point I'll hit a wall, I'm sure, but I'm not going to worry about that now.

I'm trying to get a reading knowledge of Basque. The case system doesn't seem too intimidating. It has an ergative case, which means that the subject of a transitive verb has a separate case, and there's a dative for indirect objects. Direct objects and subjects of intransitive verb are in an absolutive, unmarked case.

The verbs are a little more complex. Most of the time there are two verbs, a participle form + an auxiliary form of to be or to have. The usual morphological markings for tense, aspect, person. Euskara is agglutinative and attaches determiners the the end of the noun phrase.

The lexicon will be more of a challenge, the only help being loan words from Spanish and Latin derivatives. My goal is to be able to read with a dictionary, kind of like I could do with German. I know enough German grammar to know which words are verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc... but have to look up too many words.

Of the "four skills," reading is the easiest and also the most rewarding. For example, I can read Italian more or less, but couldn't speak it, write it, or understand very much orally. My goal is to have reading knowledge of all Romance languages. That covers all of the Iberian peninsula, except for Basque, so my new goal is to have knowledge of all Iberian + Romance languages. Romanian will be a bit of a challenge; I'll have to wait until I know Italian a bit better to make that jump.