Colloquial Basque

Colloquial Basque: The Complete Course for Beginners has been carefully developed by an experienced teacher to provide a step-by-step course to Basque as it is written and spoken today. Combining a clear, practical and accessible style with a methodical and thorough treatment of the language, it equips learners with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Basque in a broad range of situations. No prior knowledge of the language is required. Colloquial Basque is exceptional; each unit presents a wealth of grammatical points that are reinforced with a wide range of exercises for regular practice. A full answer key, a grammar summary, bilingual glossaries and English translations of dialogues can be found at the back as well as useful vocabulary lists throughout. Key features include: A clear, user-friendly format designed to help learners progressively build up their speaking, listening, reading and writing skills Jargon-free, succinct and clearly structured explanations of grammar An extensive range of focused and dynamic supportive exercises Realistic and entertaining dialogues covering a broad variety of narrative situations Helpful cultural points explaining the customs and features of life in n the Basque countryAn overview of the sounds of Basque Balanced, comprehensive and rewarding, Colloquial Basque is an indispensable resource both for independent learners and students taking courses in Basque. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

Colloquial Basque Specially written by an experienced teacher for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Basque. No prior knowledge of the language is required. What makes Colloquial Basque your best choice in personal language learning? * interactive - lots of exercises for regular practice * clear - concise grammar notes * practical - useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide * complete - including answer key and special reference section. This pack contains the paperback and audio material recorded on CDs. By the end of this rewarding course you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in a broad range of situations. These compliment the book and will help you with your pronunciation and listening skills. For the eBook and MP3 pack, please find instructions on how to access the supplementary content for this title in the Prelims section.

Colloquial Basque: The Complete Course for Beginners has been carefully developed by an experienced teacher to provide a step-by-step course to Basque as it is written and spoken today. Combining a clear, practical and accessible style with a methodical and thorough treatment of the language, it equips learners with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Basque in a broad range of situations. No prior knowledge of the language is required. Colloquial Basque is exceptional; each unit presents a wealth of grammatical points that are reinforced with a wide range of exercises for regular practice. A full answer key, a grammar summary, bilingual glossaries and English translations of dialogues can be found at the back as well as useful vocabulary lists throughout. Key features include: A clear, user-friendly format designed to help learners progressively build up their speaking, listening, reading and writing skills Jargon-free, succinct and clearly structured explanations of grammar An extensive range of focused and dynamic supportive exercises Realistic and entertaining dialogues covering a broad variety of narrative situations Helpful cultural points explaining the customs and features of life in n the Basque countryAn overview of the sounds of Basque Balanced, comprehensive and rewarding, Colloquial Basque is an indispensable resource both for independent learners and students taking courses in Basque. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

The Basque language, Euskara, is one of Europe’s most ancient tongues and a vital part of today’s lively Basque culture. Reclaiming Basque examines the ideology, methods, and discourse of the Basque-language revitalization movement over the course of the past century and the way this effort has unfolded alongside the simultaneous Basque nationalist struggle for autonomy. Jacqueline Urla employs extensive long-term fieldwork, interviews, and close examination of a vast range of documents in several media to uncover the strategies that have been used to preserve and revive Euskara and the various controversies that have arisen among Basque-language advocates.

This is the first book-length functional-typologically inspired crosslinguistic study of comitatives and related categories such as the instrumental. On the basis of data drawn from 400 languages world-wide (covering all major phyla and areas), the authors test and revise a variety of general linguistic hypotheses about the grammar and cognitive foundations of comitatives. Three types of languages are identified according to the morphological treatment of the comitative and its syncretistic association with other concepts. It is shown that the structural behaviour of comitatives is areally biassed and that the languages of Europe tend to diverge from the majority of the world's languages. This has important repercussions for a language-independent definition of the comitative. The supposed conceptual closeness of comitative and instrumental is discussed in some detail and a semantic map of the comitative is put forward. Markedness is the crucial concept for the evaluation of the relation that ties comitatives and instrumentals to each other. In a separate chapter, the diachrony of comitatives is looked into from the perspective of grammaticalisation research. Throughout the book, the argumentation is richly documented by empirical data. The book contains three case-studies of the comitative in Icelandic, Latvian and Maltese - each of which represents one of the three language types identified earlier in the text. For the purpose of comparing the languages of Europe, a chapter is devoted to the analysis of a large parallel literary corpus (covering 64 languages) which reveals that the parameters of genetic affiliation, areal location and typological classification interact in intricate ways when it comes to predicting whether or not two languages of the sample behave similarly as to the use to which they put their comitative morphemes. With a view to determining the degree of similarity between the languages of the European sub-sample, methods of quantitative typology are employed. General linguists with an interest in case, functional typologists, grammaticalisation researchers and experts of markedness issues will value this book as an important contribution to their respective fields of interest. We regret that, due to a PDF problem, the figure on page 111 is partly shown in black. Please find the correct table here.

Basque is the sole survivor of the very ancient languages of Western Europe. This book, written by an internationally renowned specialist in Basque, provides a comprehensive survey of all that is known about the prehistory of the language, including pronunciation, the grammar and the vocabulary. It also provides a long critical evaluation of the search for its relatives, as well as a thumbnail sketch of the language, a summary of its typological features, an external history and an extensive bibliography.