Talk:Basque grammar

good work
--Kamitxu 11:38, 31 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you! --A R King 08:16, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Absolutely FANTASTIC article!70.57.120.186 (talk) 01:04, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

It's a well-written article, however, it has none inline citations. Furthermore, it may need to be written to match Wikipedia's style standards, because the article consistent uses self-reference:
 * "This article provides..."
 * "Basque verbs are covered by a separate article."
 * "Given the complexity of this subject... it is the subject of a separate Wikipedia article."

It still needs a few more tweaks, however, the article is very comprehensive. For A R King and those who worked on it- well done. 50.90.74.156 (talk) 02:35, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

excellent
I am glad to see such a complete article on my mother tongue. It meets high standards (though it can be improved, sure). --Biscay (talk) 03:26, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 09:04, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Missing
Would you mention etxeren bat and Ez dakit egia denetz? --Error (talk) 00:07, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

An omission
I am disappointed to find nothing about the grammatical grammar of Basque in this language article. The reason I looked for this information is that in Grammatical gender, the map "Gender in European languages.png" appears with the annotation asserting that Basque has a gender based on animate/inanimate distinction (supported with a source), yet the latest version of that file has been modified with the comment "basque language has no gender". Should one trust the article, or the editor who may be a native Basque speaker? (I could have determined this myself if there was something about this in the article.) -- llywrch (talk) 18:24, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I think I have found something. Can you view p.115 here? And there is section 3.3. in this grammar. –Austronesier (talk) 18:34, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
 * , I had a look at both the sources you link to (this time I could read the page at books.google) & neither clearly indicated if Basque had grammatical gender. In noun class, there is a section on Basque that indicates that it has noun classes -- animate & inanimate -- but they have only minor visibility in the language. And grammatical gender is a subgroup of noun class. It sounds as if the matter is disputed, depending on which expert is considering the evidence. And disputed topics are even more difficult to include in a Wikipedia article. -- llywrch (talk) 06:29, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I've dug into the history of Grammatical gender, and found out that the statement about Basque having gender is unsourced. The citation ("Corbett 1991, pp.20–21") originally was meant only for Ojibwe, but was joined into a single sentence that included Basque in this edit.
 * There are many sources that describe the differences in Basque locative case marking based on animacy, but I still haven't found a source which actually calls this a gender distinction. But several good sources say that Basque has no grammatical gender, e.g. Trask (1997), The History of Basque, p. 115: "Basque has no noun classes, no well-developed classifiers and no grammatical gender of any kind. […] Animate and inanimate noun phrases differ only in the way they form local cases, and in no other respect." or the WALS (ironically, the WALS chapter on gender is by Corbett, the "spurious" source for Basque gender in Grammatical gender). –Austronesier (talk) 09:12, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
 * On the basis of that research, feel free to correct the passages in question. -- llywrch (talk) 13:30, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

'Article'
The text refers to an 'article' in Basque and links to the wikipedia page Article (grammar), but even the definition on that page already states that an 'article' is normally understood to express something connected to identifiability (stuff like definiteness, indefiniteness etc.). In the case of the Basque 'article', judging from the glosses, it seems that there is no such connection. This should be stated explicitly, and it would also be good to explain what it expresses then (or, alternatively, what the form without the 'article' expresses). 62.73.69.121 (talk) 17:34, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Structure
The structure of the text is a bit confusing and makes it hard to navigate. A more natural and standard approach would be to start with the noun itself and not with the noun phrase and the various determiners, modifiers etc. The ending sets would be easier to make sense of if they had meaningful names (singular article, plural article etc.) instead of just numbers (1-4), and the more derived endings with the article should be placed after and not before the basic endings without an article. It might also be a good idea to give the presumable basic forms of the endings from the start. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 17:36, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The disposition of the section on pronouns is peculiar, too. The table of present-day personal pronouns should come first, as that's the most essential information. Instead, the section starts with some details about the history of the second person, complete with a table of its own.--62.73.69.121 (talk) 00:47, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Bad description of noun morphology
This is not a good description, it is untidy and asystematic, and is deeply incorrect from the point of view of morphology: one of the most striking errors is classifying number forms as "declension classes". Number is a value within a declension class, not a declension class by itself. There are no declension classes in an agglutinative language such as Basque, at least, in principle. At most we could consider two declension classes according to animacy (which is completely disregarded in the article, by the way), but four classes according to number is just nonsense. By the way, the Spanish page is identical to this, and therefore, it is as bad as this. The Basque version is perfect, but not available for everyone, unfortunately. There are plenty of English sources on Basque noun morphology (Trask, de Rijk; newer ones: Santazilia 2017, Igartua 2020...) that the author could have relied on. 5.159.175.145 (talk) 15:49, 4 June 2024 (UTC)