Euskaltzaindia presents at the Durango Fair “Euskararen grammatika”, “a Basque grammar of the XXI century”

The Euskaltzaindia Grammar Commission started up in 1980, and eleven years later the Academy published the first volume of the series “Euskal Gramatika Lehen Urratsak” (EGLU), related to simple sentences; It would be followed by six more volumes until 2011 on verbs, connectors, conjunctions and three on subordinate clauses.

Now, ten years after the last installment of the EGLU series, the Academy has published “Basque grammar”, “a dignified and homologous grammar” in the words of Miren Azkarate, linguist member of the Euskaltzaindia Grammar Commission since its foundation, in today’s presentation ceremony.

‘Basque grammar’

Azkarate has explained that the work presented today, composed of two volumes of one thousand pages each, is not a simple summary of the publications made to date, but rather the new grammar includes concepts widely used in linguistics since 1990.

For example, in “Euskararen gramatika”, the terms “declension” and “case system” have been differentiated; a looser point of view has been applied to the order of words, and the “syntactic structure” has been differentiated from the “informational structure”; and a radical change has been made to the chapters that the first two volumes of EGLU offered on the noun, the adjective, the pronouns, the adverbs, the determiners and the verbs.

Azkarate has underlined the importance of the thematic index of the work, 100 pages that have occupied two years. “The work will be more profitable for experts, students and researchers, but, thanks to the thematic index, other types of less specialized people will also be able to use it. If you are only interested in information about the subordinate conjunction bait-, You just have to consult the index and look at the information related to it, “he explained.

In addition, they have also remarked that this work, “which aspires to be a benchmark for the next decade”, is full of examples, most of them collected from 21st century corpus.

To end with a smile, Adolfo Arejita has addressed those who feel overwhelmed by the more than 2000 pages of grammar: “If you use it with good humor, grammar can be entertaining and charming,” he said.