Post Berriak

Firstly, I don't actually know anything about Basque grammar or word order or anything really related to Basque. To enlighten myself, I decided to do some guided translations. I had a translation of a work in Basque, sentence by sentence, and I set out to deduce what each word seemed to mean. This would look something like the following, but trust that mine were more complicated (bolded for what I add):

Hau etxea da. (This is a house) [this/house/is]

Nothing technical, this was just to practice and expand my horizons. There were some difficulties in establishing the exact meaning of some function words, but overall it was pretty straightforward. With my confidence high, I took to finding random other Basque phrases, expressions, and the like to play with. I was able even to figure out some grammatical aspects to the language looking at all of these expressions. Then I came across Berri txarrak. I immediately recognized the content value, but was confused when I noticed that the adjective seemed to mark the plural, but the noun didn't. I glossed it as follows

Berri txarrak. (Bad news) [news/bad+plural]

I searched around to see how I managed to foul this one up. Multiple instances of berriak were found meaning news, and I did also find the following:

Txiste berriak (New jokes) [joke/new+plural]

The translation is certain, and the gloss is probably quite on, so here is a parallel where you can substitute those same units and have the meaning parallel. I did discoverd usages of berri occuring by itself, as in Hampshire Berri for New Hampshire. It looks like berri occuring after the noun give it the significance of new. When it occurs first, and before another adjective, it becomes the noun news. I guess you would then have:

Berri berriak (New news) [news/new+plural]

and not

?Berriak berri (New news) [news+plural/new]

Maybe there's some other stuff that has to do with whether something encompasses a phrase or not, especially since it seems to be the last unit. Still though, I love how the plural agreement morpheme seems to fall on the adjective, but not on the noun. I don't think I've seen that anywhere else.

Note: a quick check of a Basque grammar reference tells me that -ak is added to the end of a phrase. That made things simple.