Pronounciation

[OrE]

Descending diptongues are conserved: eus-ka-ra, ai-pa-tu, ja-rrai-ki. In this case, even words that originally weren't diptongs -as they had an aspired h in the middle- tend to be pronounced as diptongues nowadays: "nahi" is systematically pronounced as nahi in the southern part of the Basque Country.

I think you meant {..."nahi" is systematically pronounced as nai [naj] in the ...} (This is my case )

[arabarra]

, yes, my mistake, that's what I mean. Thanks, OrE.

... and how do you pronounce "Valencia" in Basque, by the way?

[nannerl]

Thank you very much!

I've never left Basque estudy, but I'm really busy with school homework and mainly with its exams.

The information you gift has been very useful, so thanks again
But I think you didn't answer to one of my questions, or perhaps I didn't understand the reply in your messages:

And, how do you pronounce words which have only two syllabes?

Thank you

[arabarra]

then I wish you good look with your examinations...

The question about pronounciation of words with two syllabes is difficult. I know that I repeat myself the whole time: it's very dependent on the local variation of the Basque.

As a general rule, accent is smoother in Basque. That is something that you notice if you listen to a song: you can fit whichever text in the melody of a song, because it does not force too much the ears of the listener. In Spanish, the sentence accents must coincide with the melody accents, otherwise it sounds just horrible!

In spite of that, there are, say, general rules, as we said before. In the case of the accentuation of short words, I would say the trick is that the "accent unit" in Basque is the whole sintagm, not the seperate words (as in Spanish). For this reason, words that aggregate logically, do also aggregate phonetically. An example: you would probably pronounce "egín duzú", "gertá liteké", "etórri dén ikásle berrí honí parránda egiteá gustátzen zaió" (as in the last sentence the "logical units" are "(etórri dén) (ikásle berrí honí) (parránda egiteá) (gustátzen zaió)").

But other pronounciation schemes are also possible.
Hope OrE visits us and gives us his views on it...