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This article has a twofold aim. First, it incorporates a concise, yet fairly complete, discussion of manner adverbs occurring in the present literary standard form of the Basque language. No semantic analysis of any profundity will be offered, the emphasis being rather on quite superficial morphology. Despite its modest scope, this part of the article may be particularly welcome to teachers of the language and their students, both within Euskadi and abroad. At the same time I would like this essay to be a contribution to diachronic morphology. To this end, sections have been included providing a historical background relating to the various suffixes that derive adverbs from adjectives.

This article boils down to an exercise in internal reconstruction, although of a rather unusual sort, since the goal is to reconstruct a lexical item, the predecessor of Basque orain, meaning 'now'. The method is tested in the case of French maintenant and is then applied to Basque. Frequent appeal is made to the oldest literary monuments of Basque, in particular the works of Leizarraga, an attentive study of which has uncovered certain characteristics of usage which have hitherto escaped attention. In the course of the investigation several other matters are touched upon, such as: the oldest shape of the case ending -raino, the etymology of the suffix -danik, as well as that of the Spanish word izquierdo 'left', where we are able to vindicate Manuel de Larramendi's scholarship and erudition.

The term "location noun" is a convenient designation for the type of nouns represented by aurre and atze. These two items, together with their synonyms aitzin, gibel and oste, can be viewed as prototypes: their behavior is typical of location nouns, but need not be shared by the whole class. In part one, this behavior is analyzed in some detail from the point of view of a learner of Basque. In part two, roughly two dozen other location nouns are studied and occurring deviations from prototypical behavior pointed out. As a whole, the article is meant to portray the author's views as to what should be taught in this domain as part of a course in Euskara Batua, and how to teach it to a certain type of audience. It also demonstrates that location nouns can be taught early in the course, since nothing more than a knowledge of the nominal declension needs to be presupposed.