King Alan R. A Basque Course

Unpublished typescript (second draft), 1982. — 390 p.Author says:
I think that to many I am best known as the author of The Basque language: A practical introduction (University of Nevada Press, 1994; paperback edition 2012). The first edition was published several years after it was written. I never received an explanation for the inordinate delay from the publisher, which was so great that it resulted in another book for learning Basque, Colloquial Basque, which I wrote years later together with Begotxu Olaizola, being published slightly earlier than the Reno book.Yet another remarkable circumstance surrounding this my (perhaps) best-known book is that I wrote it three times. In the late seventies, I wrote a book intended for self-study by an academic-type readership titled (provisionally at least) “A Basque Course”. At some future time I intend to make that typescript publicly available for the first time by posting it here on the site. I trust it will make interesting reading — for me — as I haven’t looked at it for a great many years! My reason for writing a book with such an audience in mind is because back then it seemed sensible to think: Who, after all, could possibly be interested in learning Basque in the English-speaking world? I thought it would be a specialist work with few buyers, but an interesting exercise nonetheless as there was no other serious introduction to Basque in English anywhere....Neither the first nor the second draft has ever been published however. I don’t think the problem was with the composition of the second draft but with its character: it was a hybrid, trying to be two things at once, and perhaps was unable therefore to be either thing quite perfectly. It was a product of circumstances, and those circumstances had not been well planned, or at least not well explained in advance to the author of the book. I realised that as a classroom textbook it might have been differently organised. I told the would-be publishers so as well, and suggested that since we now know (and I hadn’t known before) that what was really required was a general-purpose practical introductory language course, I ought to be given a proper opportunity to write one. The suggestion was accepted, and so I ended up writing what was yet again a completely new book, the one that got published, some years later, by the University of Nevada Press.Which leaves two books that I wrote and hardly anybody has ever seen. Both titled “A Basque Course” but not the same book. Today, I place one of them, the second one, before the eyes of the world.