On Tue, 18 Sep 2001 17:11:01 -0400, Anne Lambert
<
annebob@...> wrote:
>I thought Basque only had one true verb 'to have' and the others were
>periphrastic. What's the story on this?
Most Basque verbs only have a periphrastic conjugation, made with ptc.
+ IZAN "to be" when intransitive, with *EDUN "to have" when transitive
(but "to have" is defective in that it has no citation form [past
ptc.], for which IZAN is usually subsituted, which is why the asterisk
on *EDUN). However, a small number of verbs (about 20 ~ 25) do have a
synthetic conjugation. In Medieval Basque the number was higher.