Talk:Basque verbs

Personal reflection?
I don't agree that "this article is written like a personal reflection", as the tag placed on it says. It was actually written as part of the Basque grammar article (is that also a "personal reflection"?) and split off late in the day, mainly for reasons of length. Perhaps the first section (How complex is the Basque verb?) helps to give the wrong impression of a personal reflection, although what it actually says is objectively quite straightforward and factual: it is a fact that the Basque verb is widely considered very difficult and that it hogs the attention of many descriptions of Basque, as the beginning of the section points out, and the list of reasons contributing to this impression is actually a list of objectively true and uncontroversial generalisations about the Basque verb. I think it's more a question of "angle" than of the content covered. But in any case, the rest of the article (after the introduction) is purely encyclopaedic in my opinion, being part of a grammatical description. Would omitting the introductory section help to correct the impression of a "personal reflection"?

I am ready to agree that some things are missing from the article to complete it, such as references to sources and internal wikilinks to concepts and terms used, inter alia. I pointed out as much on the Basque language article's discussion page when announcing this and the Basque grammar article, a few hours ago. I explained that work needs to be done on this and invited help with it.

Do others agree about the "personal reflection" criticism? Alan --A R King 21:43, 16 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Nobody has responded to the above questions and comments, and I'm anxious to do something about this, so I have decided to go ahead and follow my own tentative suggestion (previous comment) and REMOVE THE FIRST SECTION ("How complex...?"), on the assumption that this is perhaps largely responsible for the "personal reflection" judgment. On that same assumption, I shall now remove the "personal reflection" tag. That of course does not imply that the article doesn't need further work, and I'd be most grateful for anyone's help with that as my own time to devote to further work on this article, except for fleshing out the bibliography, will probably be very limited (let's say I feel I've already done my part). Naturally, if others think it still sounds like a personal reflection, they are welcome to say so and put the tag back again if they see fit. Please do not take this as an aggressive or angry reversion, but as a constructive attempt to resolve a problem that has been noted, in the absence of the feedback requested. Alan --A R King 07:00, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Great work! A treasure for learners like me. - Txalapartari (talk) 21:38, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Nor-Nori-Nork
I have a digital version of the Nor-Nori-Nork table that I made myself some time ago, does anybody think a graphic (I don't fancy doing the table in wiki hypertext :b) would be useful to people? Akerbeltz 22:44, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I've added it and placed at the end of the nori section before hitanoa... if anyone thinks it would better sit somewhere else, feel free to move it but I though there was ok. Akerbeltz (talk) 21:52, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

-en future
Isn't -en used instead of -ko in Eastern dialects? --Error (talk) 00:42, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

-tuzte-
I think that -z- in -tuzte- is the -z- pluralizer, either occurring here by analogy (possibly borrowed from other werb like "egon"("zagozte"-type form) or "eduki") or having disappeared from other plural forms of this verb(-z- appears in eduki which has the same (d)u root), since this -z- occurs also before -ke- (e.g. lituzke), and there are some words with -tute- and -tuke- (baitute "because they have it", katukeria "wheedling"). IntKecsk (talk) 19:44, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Potential
You could contrast the potential using ahal and using -ke-. --Error (talk) 00:10, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Antipassive
The antipassive voice that is known to exist in Basque apparently isn't mentioned here, at least not under that name (I haven't read the whole article).--94.155.68.202 (talk) 15:46, 16 September 2018 (UTC)


 * The antipassive is expressed through a periphrastic construction, and the focus of the article seems to be on verb morphology. The article only describes a few periphrastic constructions other than the basic participle/stem + auxiliary constructions, and I've been told that the antipassive isn't very commonly used, so I don't think it's within the scope of this article. Zgialor (talk) 23:13, 30 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Well, it's not mentioned in the main article about Basque grammar, either, and that's not too good. Ergativity is one of the most famous and exotic features of Basque, and the antipassive is a natural corollary of ergativity. Personally, I came here specifically to find out about the Basque antipassive, as well as the degree to which Basque grammar follows an ergative logic (possible split ergativity, which is said to be more the rule than the exception in ergative languages, etc.). So I definitely think it would be appropriate to have at least some information about it.--95.42.25.28 (talk) 20:04, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Remarkably, I now see that the main article about the Basque language in general does mention the antipassive paradigm, and that even before the ergative one. One would have expected this to be elaborated upon in the more specialised articles, instead of being ignored entirely. --95.42.25.28 (talk) 20:08, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The notion of an antipassive in Basque is disputed. I am aware that the threshold critera defined by some scholars (especially syntacticians) for an antipassive analysis are overly narrow (sometimes bordering on the absurd), but in the case of Basque, we should wait for this paper, which looks very promising. –Austronesier (talk) 10:09, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info and the reading suggestion. Needless to say, everybody can always google specialised papers about the (alleged) antipassives in Basque, it just would have been more convenient to be able to look it up on Wikipedia. As for what should be in the Wikipedia article - if the notion is disputed, then I don't think anything prevents the article from indicating both the fact that the notion is used - since it clearly *is* used - and the fact that it's disputed. There's no need to wait for a forthcoming paper for that - Wikipedia's mission is to express the current state of the art, not the future state of the art.--95.42.25.28 (talk) 10:43, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * My idea was, since the paper is a review of existing proposals, it will spare us to dig through all this by ourselves. Plus, a secondary source will help us to maintain due weight. But maybe I can take some time to survey the lit, it's an interesting topic. In any case, the best place to accomodate the question of antipassive voice in Basque would be Basque grammar, with a short mention in Basque language. This article here is just a big morphology chart with some prose. –Austronesier (talk) 11:20, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Misleading tables
In the tables in the "Compound tense auxiliaries" section that list some of the forms of the auxiliary verb, all of the forms with -ke are described as "potential". I think this is based on what seems to be a typical scheme for listing Basque auxiliary verb forms (as can be seen here, for instance), where the forms without -ke are listed as "-ahala" and the forms with -ke are listed as "+ahala" ("ahala" meaning "ability"), and then within those categories the forms are divided into "oraina" ("present"), "iragana" ("past"), and "alegiazkoa" ("hypothetical"). As I understand it, this scheme is purely based on morphology and is not directly based on semantics. The forms with -ke that are derived from *edin and *ezan (what the article calls the aorist forms) do indeed have a potential meaning, but the forms with -ke that are derived from izan and *edun (the ones that are listed under "'Be' auxiliary" and "'Have' auxiliary" in the tables) do not. The "hypothetic potential" forms such as nintzateke and nuke are regular conditional forms, the "past potential" forms such as nintzatekeen and nukeen are past conditional forms, and from what I can tell the "present potential" forms such as naizateke and duket seem to be archaic future-tense forms that are no longer used in most dialects (except perhaps in very formal writing). If the intent was for the tables to just be based on morphology and not semantics, then that's fine, but I don't think the article makes that clear. I think it would be better if the tables were remade in a way that more clearly indicates the actual meanings of these forms. Zgialor (talk) 23:01, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

rr vs. r
The stem of etorri, ekarri etc. clearly ends in an underlying -rr which surfaces as -r in syllable coda. Compare erori with underlying -r. 109.184.102.155 (talk) 06:46, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Third-person patiens marking
Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to interpret the prefix in forms such as zekarren as referring to the agens? 109.184.102.155 (talk) 23:18, 29 June 2024 (UTC)