Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This grammar is a facsimile reprint of an edition published originally in Spain in 1919, presenting Gipozkoan, one of the older literary dialects of Basque,. Until relatively recently, various written forms of the main Basque dialects were the only literary forms of the language available to writers and readers of Basque. In the recent decades, in the post-Franco era, a standard Unified Basque (euskara batua) has been developed and has become widely used, at least in public domains, especially in the Spanish Basque Country. Unified Basque is also one of the two official languages of the autonomous Basque region of Spain.

Since the standardized form of Unified Basque is based, to a considerable extent, on the Gipuzkoan literary language (with some input from the two most important dialects of the French Basque Country, Lapurdian, and Low Navarrese), the student of Basque will find the language described in this grammar to be rather similar to the contemporary standard language in many respects. Standardized Basque is now the form most commonly studied by non-native learners of the language and the one presented in contemporary linguistic descriptions and discussions of Basque.

The Gipuzkoan dialect is geographically situated in the central area of the Basque-speaking region of northern Spain and southwestern France. Spoken Basque is conventionally divided into seven major dialect clusters, and Gipuzkoan is one of the most widely spoken of the dialects. Since it is centrally located, it shares features with the westernmost dialect, Bizkaian, with the other dialects of the Spanish Basque Country, and with those across the political border in France.

This grammar is designed to be primarily an instructional manual of Basque. It is divided into two parts. The first part (5–158) contains a brief exposition of the author’s purpose followed by a very short discussion of the orthography and pronunciation, including indications where the spoken forms differ from the written. The rest of the first part treats the basic elements of the language: articles, noun inflections, and basic verbs. This part is divided into twenty lessons, each of which deals with a particular point of grammar and/or inflectional paradigm, and includes a vocabulary list as well as example sentences in Basque with Spanish equivalents given in parallel columns. Each lesson contains exercises consisting of sentences in Basque and in Spanish to be translated into the other language.

The second part of the book (159–370), containing thirty lessons, is organized in a similar way, but deals in much more extensive detail with the complex verb morphology of the language. Here the Basque verb is presented in its splendid complexity of subject/object/number/person agreement with its various tenses and other forms. A Basque-Spanish and Spanish-Basque glossary occupies the final portion of the book, and there is also a short index of grammatical topics.

The publisher is to be commended for making more widely available a classic description of an older Basque literary dialect. This work will be of interest to linguists of Basque, especially those interested in the history and development of the language in the twentieth century.