#basque:grammar

[guillemelgat]

I’m doing the thing I should have done a while ago which is actually learning the past tense of Basque auxiliary verbs instead of just looking them up every time I need them. Here are the charts for IZAN/NOR and UKAN/NOR-NORK.

Before we begin, ALL BASQUE PAST-TENSE VERBS END WITH “-N” which will make your life easier I promise.

Basically, IZAN is used like “to be” in English in a lot of contexts, but it is also used as the auxiliary verb in sentences with intransitive verbs. So I could say “Ikasle zen” (She was a student) where “zen” translates as “was,” but I could also say “Iritsi zen” (She arrived), where “zen” is an auxiliary verb that signifies the person, number, and part of the tense of the verb (mostly just that it’s past, not present), and “iritsi” carries the actual action of the verb, “to arrive,” as well as part of the tense because the ending shows that this was an action that only happened once in the past and had a concrete beginning and end. If the sentence was “Iristen zen” (She used to arrive), “zen” wouldn’t change, and the only change in the tense of the verb would come from “iritsi” changing to “iristen.” 

UKAN is used as the auxiliary verb in sentences with transitive verbs, so for example you could say “Liburua idatzi nuen” (I wrote the book), where “nuen” shows that the subject is first person singular and the object is third person singular. The same idea applies with “idatzi” being able to take on different endings to form the more specific tense, but I won’t get into that now. For UKAN I’ve broken everything down vaguely into the subject and the object so that you can see patterns. The pronouns going up and down along the side are the object, and ones along the top are the subject. In forming the auxiliary verb, the object part comes first, then the subject part comes second. For NI/NIK, ZU/ZUK, GU/GUK, and ZUEK, this is fairly regular. When any two of these are combined with each other, NI is represented by “nindu,” ZU is represented by “zintu,” GU is represented by “gintu,” and ZUEK is represented by “zintuzte”; as subjects, similar to the present tense, NIK is “da,” ZUK is “zu,” GUK is “gu,” and ZUEK is “zue.” For most of Basque, ZU/ZURI/ZUK will be similar to GU/GURI/GUK, which is helpful to keep in mind, which I think is due to the fact that ZU used to be plural “you” and HI was previously singular “you” (and if you’re learning HI/HIRI/HIK, that will mirror NI/NIRI/NIK). Knowing this, learning the auxiliary conjugations involving HURA/HARK and HAIEK becomes a bit easier. “Zenuen” and “genuen” are almost the same, following the typical rule of G for GU/GURI/GUK and Z for ZU/ZURI/ZUK. “Nuen” and “zuen” also mirror each other, since both are singular (though this isn’t really a pattern anywhere else). The forms for ZUEK and HAIEK both have a “-te-” inserted into the singular form to make the plural form, so as long as you know the singular, you can get to the plural. Any forms with HARK are the easiest (as usual, since HARK doesn’t really have any marker), and just add an “-e-” at the end after the usual object conjugation. Most of the forms for HAIEK as the subject use the normal object conjugation at the beginning, then add “-te-” at the end for singular (not including ZU but including ZUEK) and “-zte-” for plurals (including ZU but not ZUEK). For HAIEK as an object, the forms are basically the same as the forms for HARK, but add an “-it-” before the “u” (very similar to the present tense), and sometimes an extra “-z-” somewhere in the mix for ZUEK and HAIEK.

I’m sorry this ended up being so long, and I’ll try to finish the past tense and maybe do some other stuff too (???) in the coming week if I have time. ALSO IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I am not a Basque native speaker and I don’t know how language works so if there are any edits on both the Basque and the linguistics terminology they will be welcomed and quickly corrected.