# Euskara: gaitun



## Hercules Grytpype-Thynne

Kaixo!

I am still working on the Basque folk song I posted about a couple of week ago, from an old collection published in the 1920's by R.M. de Azkue.   I have a question about a phrase near the end of the second stanza.  The last few lines of the stanza look like this:

_oyanak arturen gaitun
šori ta abere pistiak ere
gurekin izain dire zorion lagun._

(The previous line ends with a semicolon, so presumably this text is not grammatically connected to anything that came before it.)

The song comes with a Spanish singing translation (tailored to the syllable counts and phrase lengths of the Basque text and thus not necessarily reflecting the exact meaning of the original).  It contains the phrase _una gran selva nos acogera_, "a great forest will welcome us", and it certainly looks like _oyanak arturen gaitun_ should mean roughly the same.  The thing I'm wondering about is the final -_n_ on _gaitun_.  As I understand it, "the forest will welcome us" would be _oihanak harturen_ (or _hartuko_) _gaitu_ in Batua.

So what is the final -_n _in _gaitun_?  I've considered a number of possibilities but I can't come up with anything that makes sense to me.


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## jazyk

I don't think this answers your question, but take a look here: A Grammar of Basque Gaitun or gaituk, therefore, would mean _thou_ is the subject and _we _is the object.

Pages 564 and 565 may help.


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## entangledbank

A second person singular subject doesn't make much sense there, but could it be allocutive? The actants are third singular subject and first plural object (_gaitu_ "it: us"), but the addressee is feminine familiar singular. That seems possible in a folk song. Are there other main clause verb forms in it that have this marking?


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## Hercules Grytpype-Thynne

entangledbank said:


> A second person singular subject doesn't make much sense there, but *could it be allocutive*? The actants are third singular subject and first plural object (_gaitu_ "it: us"), but the addressee is feminine familiar singular. That seems possible in a folk song. Are there other main clause verb forms in it that have this marking?


I thought of that, but the song is sung by a bride to her new husband (in the previous line, which I unfortunately failed to quote, she addresses him as _senar_), so a feminine allocutive would be unlikely here, unless for some reason the speaker changes between the previous line and this one.  I don't see any indication - other than this possible allocutive - that such a thing is happening.  Also, there don't appear to be any allocutives, feminine or masculine, anywhere else in the text.

De Rijk's grammar of Batua says that adding an allocutive to _gaitu _would also change the final vowel, producing _gaitik/gaitin_.  However, this text is pre-Batua and I've noticed that the treatment of vowels can differ considerably from dialect to dialect, so that needn't be dispositive.


jazyk said:


> I don't think this answers your question, but take a look here: A Grammar of Basque Gaitun or gaituk, therefore, would mean _thou_ is the subject and _we _is the object.
> 
> Pages 564 and 565 may help.


I could see _oyanak_ being the (vocative) subject of a second-person verb ("You, forest, will welcome us"), but I don't see why it would be addressed in the feminine familiar.   Also, as I said in my reply to entangledbank's comment, the song is addressed to the bride's new husband.*  Why would she suddenly start addressing the forest instead?

On the other hand, if _oyanak _is not the subject, what is it doing there?  I realize that it could be absolutive plural instead of ergative singular, but then I don't understand its grammatical role in the sentence.

-----------------------
* I really must apologize for leaving that line out in my original citation.  It turns out to be much more relevant that I thought.


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## jazyk

Did you take a look at the pages I told you about? I think that might explain it.

I'd rule out oihanak as vocative singular, because it would then not exhibit the ergative mark (a)k.


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## Hercules Grytpype-Thynne

Those pages talk about a construction that uses an interrogative word and the complementizer _-_(_e_)_n_.  I suppose that the _-n_ could be a complementizer (although IIRC that would behave differently in Batua:  _gaituen_).  However, there's no interrogative word here.  (Edited to add: ) OTOH it's dialectical poetry.  Maybe the interrogative is understood somehow.

Regarding the vocative question, can an ergative noun not be used with a second-person verb?  I thought I saw something in de Rijk that implied that this was possible.  I'll need to check but I don't have my copy with me at the moment.


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## jazyk

What I see on those pages is a reference to exclamations, surprise and the like.


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## Hercules Grytpype-Thynne

True, but the text explicitly says that such exclamations contain an interrogative word, and all the examples given conform to that.


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