Questions on Basque

arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-04-27, 6:59

Lastly, I keep seeing this word xamar, the dictionary says it means blusón,


:rotfl:

but that doesn't make sense in context, it seems more like "asko".

-xelebre xamar zabiltza
-maitea ere aspertu xamar duzu
-oldartsu xamarra zara


I love this question :D !

Here there is a funny confusion: both initial 'z' and 's' have the same hipochoristic form 'x', so you get two totally different words converging to the same "mollified" form:

samar -> xamar (enough, maybe a little more than enough)
zamar -> xamar (coat, jacket.. )


So "oldartsu xamarra zara" is more or less "you're rather hot tempered", "xelebre xamar zabiltza" is "you're acting kind of weird"...



I don't know if there are more examples of this phenomenon!

By the way, in Spanish, "zamar" has left two loan words, different to each other (although part of the same lexical family): the commonly used "chamarra" and the more specific "zamarro".

crush
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby crush » 2016-04-28, 4:54

Ah, thanks. For the bezala sentence, I was thinking it meant "Your friend loves you like you (love him/her)", I guess that's where my confusion came from.

The second sentence also makes much more sense now, I was putting gelditu and da together. I still have trouble figuring out what goes with what, though things are finally starting to stick. I can generally work my way through an article with a dictionary (and verb charts). Btw, ibn the dictionary I saw that jardun had synthetic forms, is this another verb I should learn synthetic forms for?

And you're saying xamar here is a sort of diminutive of samar? Thanks for all your help, I really appreciate it :D
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arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-04-28, 7:23

Btw, ibn the dictionary I saw that jardun had synthetic forms, is this another verb I should learn synthetic forms for?


Not very used, but they show up occasionally. You just need the diharduXX forms (and their past tense), everything else is pedantic.... don't expect to hear things like "nihardute" or "dihardukidate"...

crush
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby crush » 2016-05-06, 5:33

Today I came across this sentence:
Farmazia batean egiten dinat lan.

I'm unfamiliar with the dinat form, I assume this is one of those forms that changes depending on the gender of whomever it is you're speaking with (like the hika forms)?
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arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-05-07, 14:14

That's correct. "Dinat" is the hitano form of "dut" when talking to a girl.

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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby crush » 2016-05-21, 5:12

Ok, more questions:
Gai hau parlamentu honetan ahotara ekartzea egokia iruditzen zaigu *nire parlamentuko taldeko kideoi*, inoiz ez baitago soberan emakumeen eskubideen defentsan eginiko edozein keinu, *zein hartutako ezein erabaki*.

Is the "nire...kideoi" bit like saying "to the members of my parliamentary group ... and me"?

Also, is "zein... ezein" a set construction? I looked for it online but didn't find anything. It looks like it means "regardless of the decision taken", but I'm not sure.

Ah, and where did the -i- in "eginiko" come from? Is that like "egindako"?

"ohiko kontratuei dagokienez, gizonei lanaldi osoko 329 kontratu egin zaizkie"
Why is egin used here instead of, say, eman? What they mean is that the contracts were given to men, right?
Guk euskaraz, zuk zergatik ez?

arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-05-21, 19:06

Is the "nire...kideoi" bit like saying "to the members of my parliamentary group ... and me"?


nope. "Nire" goes with "kide". So the sentence translates roughly as "to my fellow M.P.s"

Ah, and where did the -i- in "eginiko" come from? Is that like "egindako"?


yep. "eginik" is totally equivalent to "eginda". The form is (r)ik, so it produces egonIK, izanIK, apurtuRIK, erabiliRIK, etc...

"ohiko kontratuei dagokienez, gizonei lanaldi osoko 329 kontratu egin zaizkie"
Why is egin used here instead of, say, eman? What they mean is that the contracts were given to men, right?


...hm... it is just like that. In Basque, the employers "make" contracts to the employees. "Kontrata eman" (and not kontratua in this case!) sounds like something different: when an official institution opens a call for private contractors to perform some public service, the company with the best offer (or best connections with the major) gets the job. In this case, we say that the City council "gave" the contract to this or that company: "udalak halako edo nolako enpresari eman dio kontrata"

arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-05-21, 19:09

and no, "zein... ezein" is not a construction. In that sentence each one is playing its own role.

crush
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby crush » 2016-05-23, 13:32

Thanks again for all the explanations, it's all clearer now. Well, except for the zein/ezein part. I'm still not sure what that last phrase is saying...
zein hartutako - which taken...
ezein erabaki - no decision

Also, i keep coming across these "dago" words, dagoeneko, dagokienez/dagokionez, and i'm sure there are others, i've just seen these two recently. Are these words the dago stem with suffixes added to it? Dagoeneko looks like dagoen+ko, and the o/e change in dagoki[o/e]nez also smells of something going on under the hood there.

EDIT: I also came across the form denentz (ez dakit etorriko denentz) which looked like an euskalki form, at least i'd never seen that form before. I looked it up online and found this, which seems to say that the -(e)netz form is like saying -en ala ez, right? Beraz, batuazko (?) forma denetz izango litzateke, ezta? Forma hau arrunta al da euskara batuaz? Nik "ez dakit etorriko den (ala ez)" idatzi izango nuke.
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arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-05-23, 21:51

Also, i keep coming across these "dago" words, dagoeneko, dagokienez/dagokionez, and i'm sure there are others, i've just seen these two recently. Are these words the dago stem with suffixes added to it? Dagoeneko looks like dagoen+ko, and the o/e change in dagoki[o/e]nez also smells of something going on under the hood there.


Well, without the context where you saw it probably my explanation will be less effective, but let's try.

Both of them are indeed related to "dago", although you'll need some creativity to reconstruct the logical path from the ingredients to the actual meaning, although syntactically they are both totally straightforward.

Dagoeneko means "already"... "etorri dira dagoeneko", "they're already here".
If you think of it, it does have a logic. If you translate literally "dago" +(e)n+(e)ko , you get "for the moment that there is". You have to think of this -ko as the same in geroko, orduko... and probably the one in etorriko, ibiliko, etc...

About "dagokio", it was (originally) just the nor-nori form of "dago". If you supplement the "egon" verb with a "nori" case, the resulting meaning conveys the idea of correspondence, or belonging:

Iparraldeko koroa Starktarrei dagokie: The crown in the North corresponds/belongs/is naturally linked to the Starks.

crush
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby crush » 2016-05-24, 4:14

Thanks, i thought that it was a nor-nori form but i'd never seen/heard of it.
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arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-05-24, 8:13

ez baitago soberan emakumeen eskubideen defentsan eginiko edozein keinu, *zein hartutako ezein erabaki*.


You have to analize the sentence syntactically from the top. You'll come down to:

ez baitago soberan emakumeen eskubideen defentsan [A] zein [B].

[A]: any made signal
[B]: any takek decision

"No [signal done] or [decision taken] in defence of women's rights is too much"

Ezein is just there to avoid repeating the structure "edozein", specially after the zein: ... edozein ... zein... edozein... the author of the sentence went for an alternative, more literary word: ezein instand of edozein (or the colloquial inongo, that could also be used here)

arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-05-24, 16:42

EDIT: I also came across the form denentz (ez dakit etorriko denentz) which looked like an euskalki form, at least i'd never seen that form before. I looked it up online and found this, which seems to say that the -(e)netz form is like saying -en ala ez, right? Beraz, batuazko (?) forma denetz izango litzateke, ezta? Forma hau arrunta al da euskara batuaz? Nik "ez dakit etorriko den (ala ez)" idatzi izango nuke.


Bai, bete-betean asmatu duzu. :)
Hegoaldean ez da gehiegi erabiltzen, arlo literarioan izan ezik.

crush
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby crush » 2016-05-25, 6:03

Mila esker :)

"Bilbo Francoren eskuetan erortzear zela eta, Agirrek ihes egin behar izan zuen."
"erortzear" is from erori, right? But what is this -ar ending? Also, why do we have zela instead of zen? It means the same thing as saying "zen eta", right?

And lastly, -(e)la can also have the same meaning as -(e)nean, right? Eg. guda hasi zela vs. guda hasi zenean.
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arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-05-26, 7:41

"erortzear" is from erori, right? But what is this -ar ending?


-t(z)ear means "about to", "on the verge of", "just moments before"


And lastly, -(e)la can also have the same meaning as -(e)nean, right? Eg. guda hasi zela vs. guda hasi zenean.


not quite. -(e)la(rik) is more for a period of time, rather than a puntual event:

"guda hasi zenean, Euzko Gudarostean eman nuen izena". When the war began, I enlisted in the Basque Army.

"Bilbo erortzear zela, janari gutxi aurkitzen zen dendetan" In the period when Bilbo was about to fall, the food was scarce in the shops.

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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby crush » 2016-05-26, 10:50

Ah, thanks. I'd never seen that -t(z)ear ending before, i thought it looked like the allative -(a)ra form without the last 'a', which seems about right. In Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar they say that intransitive verbs should use egon and transitive verbs eduki, but here we've got izan. Is that a steadfast rule?

And i guess "when" and "in the period when" both seem pretty similar to me. Is it something along the lines of "When the war began" (hasi zenean) and "When/As the war was beginning" (maybe.. hasten zela)?
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arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-06-01, 17:36

In Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar they say that intransitive verbs should use egon and transitive verbs eduki, but here we've got izan. Is that a steadfast rule?


uh? in the context of -T(z)ear? ... hm, the euki form sounds correct but rather bookish to me...


And i guess "when" and "in the period when" both seem pretty similar to me. Is it something along the lines of "When the war began" (hasi zenean) and "When/As the war was beginning" (maybe.. hasten zela)?


hm... let me see if I can express it better:

-enean: ...in the puntual moment in in which....

-ela: ...in some moment during the extended period in in which....

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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby crush » 2016-06-03, 16:21

I think i'll try to pay attention to how it's used when i come across it reading, hopefully it'll slowly start to make sense.

I've got two questions today:
Bizitzaren misterioak eragiten duen jakin-min egon-ezinari erantzuten die eta bere inguruko fenomeno naturalei azalpena ematen die.
They answer the curiosity and anxiety that the mystery of life brings about... but why is it egon-ezinari and not egon-ezinei? And is no eta required between the two (jakin-min eta egon-ezinari)?

Elezaharrak diotenez
Why isn't this elezaharrek diotenez? It's plural, right? Does it not need to be in the ergative?

EDIT: And another question:
"Euskal Herriko elezaharretan Lurra, Ama-Lurra, agertzen zaigu Jainko nagusi legez. Izaki guztien bizilekua eta babesa, berezko bizitza indarra duena eta natura guztiaren sortzailea."
There are a couple things here i don't quite get. The second sentence seems like it doesn't have a verb? "The housing and protection of all creatures, one who has an intrinsic life force (unsure about this part), and the creator of all nature." It seems like there should be a "...are some of her responsibilities" or something at the end.

EDIT2: "hildakoen arimen eta pertsonaia mitologiko gehienak"
Is "arimen" in noren because of gehienak? Can we that gehienak refers to both the arimak and pertsonaia mitologikoak? And why is one in the noren case and the other in mugagabe? I figure noren is optional here, I just wanted to double check.
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arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-06-06, 9:00

Elezaharrak diotenez
Why isn't this elezaharrek diotenez? It's plural, right? Does it not need to be in the ergative?


In batua, yes. Bizkaiera and gipuzkera, however, don't use ergative in the plural. With Bizkaiera the story is even more complicated, as they do a funny game with the tonality in order to show the ergativity of the demonstrative articles, but that I've never fully understood myself, and it is also very dependent on local dialects.

this is a typical error from native speakers.

arabarra
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Re: Questions on Basque

Postby arabarra » 2016-06-06, 9:05

Bizitzaren misterioak eragiten duen jakin-min egon-ezinari erantzuten die eta bere inguruko fenomeno naturalei azalpena ematen die.
They answer the curiosity and anxiety that the mystery of life brings about... but why is it egon-ezinari and not egon-ezinei? And is no eta required between the two (jakin-min eta egon-ezinari)?


but why should it be "egon ezinei"? The author choose to speak about the anxiety, to the anxieties.

About the missing "eta", it's right, you should put some eta there. I guess it is just an stilistic resource, he probably wants to acustically stress the parallelism between the structures jakin-min/egon-ezin...

... or he just forgot to put the "eta" :D


EDIT

hmm... I read the sentence again, and suddenly I came to think that maybe "jakin-min egon-ezin" is intended as a single syntagm, and the author meant it to express the idea of "an anxiety related born from the curiosity"... That's a possibility too, but that'd be really stretching the rules of the language for the sake of the creativity...


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