Comparative Study of the Verbal Systems of Basque and German through Dictionary Examples
Translation: Kristin Addis
Abstract
The comparative study of languages continues to offer innumerable channels for reflection and research. Language and verbal communication are phenomena of deep social content, and the present state of any given language will be inseparably united with the specific history of the society that speaks it. This fact is particularly evident in times of great change because it is especially at such times that great lexical transformations occur. Linguistic development reflects what happens to the community of speakers, especially if that community lives in a situation of diglossia. This article deals with some of the difficulties that the author has had to face in creating a German-Basque/Basque-German dictionary because, although there is a corpus of works that have been translated from one language to the other, the two languages have never before been compared with the precision required by the work of creating a dictionary. The article also offers, briefly, the necessary and inevitable solutions that have had to be provided for these problems, particularly those that have to do with the verbal systems of the two languages.
