Rain (n) Rain (vb) ~ Different Languages...?

[Bryan]

Alright guys,

So basically I was wondering how different languages handle pairs such as "rain" (vb) vs. rain (n) and how common those ways are.

Now, obviously English has no problem using the same word as either a noun or a verb. Likewise, I know Spanish does this (albeit with the relevant verby or noun changes: llover vs. lluvia, rained raining etc. But what other options are commonly used?
("do rain" for the verb "rain", where rain is a noun, is fairly common... I imagine....)


FYI,
If this sounds a little oobscure a post or else idiotic, I'm thinking about my CIAL, and thinking about how makes most sense to handle these type of pairs and also avoid being too English. For example, English say "write" but "writing" and "eat" but "food" -- or are these pairs not really analogous to "rain" noun vs verb...???

[Bob Johnson]

Japanese has 雨 <ame> for the noun and 雨が降る <ame ga furu> "rain falls" for the "verb."

[Rui]

Mandarin is the same as Japanese. "rain" (the noun) is 雨 (yu3), while "to rain"ｉｓ　下雨 (fall rain).

German has two different words from the same root. "rain" is Regen, "to rain" is regnen, probably from earlier regenen.

[Bryan]

Japanese has 雨 <ame> for the noun and 雨が降る <ame ga furu> "rain falls" for the "verb."

Hmm, interesting. Cheers, man.

How does Japanese handle:
(a) other weather stuff, e.g., wind, noun versus verb? (I assume hail, snow, etc, are all formed akin to rain)
(b) other general vocab that in English are the same, e.g. "sleep" verb and noun, "talk" noun vs. verb, and so on.

[Bryan]

Mandarin is the same as Japanese. "rain" (the noun) is 雨 (yu3), while "to rain"ｉｓ　下雨 (fall rain).

German has two different words from the same root. "rain" is Regen, "to rain" is regnen, probably from earlier regenen.

Hi Chibi,

Is "fall rain" considered a compound noun, a compound verb, or a VP?

[Bob Johnson]

How does Japanese handle:
(a) other weather stuff, e.g., wind, noun versus verb? (I assume hail, snow, etc, are all formed akin to rain)

風 <kaze> "wind"
風が吹く <kaze ga fuku> "the wind blows"
It's fairly noun-centric.

(b) other general vocab that in English are the same, e.g. "sleep" verb and noun, "talk" noun vs. verb, and so on.

The general construction is to use the -i form of the verb:
話す <hanasu> "talk (about, with), have a conversation; tell (a story); speak (a language)"
話し or 話 <hanashi> "something talked about; a story"

e.g.
何の話？
nan no hanash-i?
what GEN speak-INF
What are [you] talking about?

(Nits: normal kanji/kana orthography treats the noun and "infinitive" verb separately though there's no real difference; also the "infinitive" is nothing like the IE infinitives, which is why I call it i-form, but that's a pain to gloss)

[Astraios]

Lakota can have maǧážu as the noun or the verb "it is raining", but it can also say mní hiŋhé "water | precipitate" rain is falling.

[merijn]

Dutch has regen the noun "rain" and regenen the verb "to rain", which has the same stem as the verb. Curiously we also have eten "to eat" and as a noun "food" we have the infinitive eten

Zulu is perhaps interesting because it has very different stems for the noun and the verb the noun "rain" is imvula, which has as its stem (m)vula and the verb is ukuna, with na as its stem. I always found it funny that "eat" behaves just like Dutch; the verb is ukudla with as its stem dla, and the noun "food" is the infinitive ukudla.

[Izambri]

In Catalan there are:

1. Pairs with close but not exact roots, that evolved directly from pairs that share a common root: ploure "to rain" (from plovĕre < pluĕre) / pluja "rain" (from plŏia < plŭvĭa).

2. Pairs with the same form for the verb and the noun, evolved from a single word: menjar "to eat" and "food" (from manducare / mandicare, a verb that also worked as a noun. Note that Catalan also has the slang manducar "to eat" / manduca "food").

3. Nouns that are inferred from verbs by removing the infinitve suffix (postverbal derivations): trencar "to broke" > trenc "breaking"

4. Pairs that share a common root because the noun is derivated from the verb or viceversa, but their meanings are not equally paired: pujar "to ascend" / puig "low hill", not "ascension"; muntar "to ride" / munt "pile" and mont "mount", not "riding".

[----]

In Vietnamese, the noun is mưa, while 'it's raining' would be trời mưa. trời means 'sky', so I suppose this literally translates to something like 'The sky rains'

As for your other examples, eat and food in Vietnamese can both be ăn, and write is viết, while writing is sự viết, 'an act/event of writing'

[Rui]

Mandarin is the same as Japanese. "rain" (the noun) is 雨 (yu3), while "to rain"ｉｓ　下雨 (fall rain).

German has two different words from the same root. "rain" is Regen, "to rain" is regnen, probably from earlier regenen.

Hi Chibi,

Is "fall rain" considered a compound noun, a compound verb, or a VP?

A VP. In fact, 下雨 is literally how you say "It's raining."

今天下雨 (jin1 tian1 xia4 yu3)
It's raining today.
(今天 = 'today')

[Nortaneous]

Curiously we also have eten "to eat" and as a noun "food" we have the infinitive eten

Same in German, I think: essen (v), Essen (n.)

[Thry]

Alright guys,

So basically I was wondering how different languages handle pairs such as "rain" (vb) vs. rain (n) and how common those ways are.

Now, obviously English has no problem using the same word as either a noun or a verb. Likewise, I know Spanish does this (albeit with the relevant verby or noun changes: llover vs. lluvia, rained raining etc. But what other options are commonly used?
("do rain" for the verb "rain", where rain is a noun, is fairly common... I imagine....)


FYI,
If this sounds a little oobscure a post or else idiotic, I'm thinking about my CIAL, and thinking about how makes most sense to handle these type of pairs and also avoid being too English. For example, English say "write" but "writing" and "eat" but "food" -- or are these pairs not really analogous to "rain" noun vs verb...???

Portuguese and Galician do as Spanish: chover/chuva, and something similar in Galician (I believe choiva is the noun). My romlang does this as well: plover, pluia. Another common nominalization in my romlang is the null morpheme, which is basically the bare stem of the verb (a parallel in Spanish is adding -o, and that's the historical origin). Spanish:

llorar > lloro (cry, lament)
cantar > canto (sing, singing)

You can also do it from a participle, maybe an irregular one, maybe playing with gender:

reír > risa (risus, -a, -um in Latin)
llamar > llamada (call, v. and n.)

What you said about pairs varies with language. For example, in Spanish we say "eaten" for "food": comida (feminine participle of comer, to eat).

What you're referring to the verb vs -ing is because the verb was first, then the noun derived from it with the -ing form. If the noun had been first, or coetaneous, then the verb would just be the noun as in rain (n.) vs. rain (v.); because English doesn't nominalize the way it verbalizes.

[Ziz]

Hebrew only has a word for "rain (n)," IIRC.

.יוֹרֵד גֶּשֶׁם
Yoréd gešem.
descend.[MSG.PRES] rain
"It's raining."

"Write" and "writing" (as in the act of writing) have the same root in Hebrew, K-T-B, and are respectively כָּתַב (katáv) and כּתִיבָה (ktivá). Similarly, "eat," "eating" and "food" all share one root, ʔ-K-L, and are respectively אָכַל (ʔakhál), אֲכִילָה (ʔakhíla) and אֹכֵל (ʔókhel).

[Ser]

Now, obviously English has no problem using the same word as either a noun or a verb. Likewise, I know Spanish does this (albeit with the relevant verby or noun changes: llover vs. lluvia, rained raining etc. But what other options are commonly used?

What relevant "verby or noun changes"? There's no way to derive lluvia from llover or viceversa. It's an example of a language that treats them differently, although they do have the same root.

In Arabic you also get a verb and a noun from the same root: أمطرت ʔamṭarat (I've no idea why it's always in the feminine) 'to rain', مطر maṭar 'rain' (masculine gender, plural أمطار ʔamṭār).

[Niedokonany]

Polnisch has deszcz as the noun and padać (fall) as the verb. That, or the expression deszcz pada (rain falls), though simply pada would generally be understood just as well. Interestingly, it's not just subject omission but an impersonal clause (past tense is padało - the neuter gender here, while deszcz is masculine: deszcz padał 'it was raining').

'Food' is jedzenie, which also means "eating" (jeść 'eat'). In more specialized or technical contexts various other words are preferable, like żywność, pożywienie, pokarm etc. The first two are derived from 'alive'.

[Terra]

If this sounds a little oobscure a post or else idiotic, I'm thinking about my CIAL, and thinking about how makes most sense to handle these type of pairs and also avoid being too English. For example, English say "write" but "writing" and "eat" but "food" -- or are these pairs not really analogous to "rain" noun vs verb...???

"food" - "feed". I suppose one could use "feed" reflexively if they wanted to.

Also, more Japanese:
taberu - to eat
tabemono - food

Too lazy for kanji at the moment.

[Jipí]

German has two different words from the same root. "rain" is Regen, "to rain" is regnen, probably from earlier regenen.

My MHG dictionary gives regenen /ˈrɛɡənən/ as one of the occurring forms of the verb besides regen, regnen and reinen (/-ɛɡə-/ > /-eɪ-/ is a regular contraction) for modern regnen /ˈreːknən ~ ˈreːçnən/. As for eat/food and drink, German also uses the same word for both the verb and the noun: essen/das Essen, trinken/das Trinken.

[Khvaragh]

Now, obviously English has no problem using the same word as either a noun or a verb. Likewise, I know Spanish does this (albeit with the relevant verby or noun changes: llover vs. lluvia, rained raining etc. But what other options are commonly used?

What relevant "verby or noun changes"? There's no way to derive lluvia from llover or viceversa. It's an example of a language that treats them differently, although they do have the same root.

In Arabic you also get a verb and a noun from the same root: أمطرت ʔamṭarat (I've no idea why it's always in the feminine) 'to rain', مطر maṭar 'rain' (masculine gender, plural أمطار ʔamṭār).

Most likely because there's an omitted pleonastic subject which is feminine i.e. this shows up in Egyptian Colloquial, where the standard is الدنيا بتشتي /id:inja: bitiSti:/. الدنيا is feminine, and usually means "world," so "the world is raining," literally.
تشتي is the imperfect reflex of Classical شتا /Sata:/, likely a denominative from الشتاء /aS:ita:?/ "winter." Keep in mind that the distinction between "cold rain" (or regular rain) and snow is a very loose in the Arab world, considering I can probably count on one hand the number of times it's rained here since I've lived here (and note, always in the winter, so winter = rainy season). There's also the more Classical الدنيا بتمطّر /id:inja bitmat_?\:ar/, but no one says that (in Cairo anyways). I'd imagine that Classical uses a similar construction when not omitting the subject, or perhaps more prosaically, السماء /as:ama:?/ "sky," which is also feminine, but I've never personally seen this usage.

Hebrew only has a word for "rain (n)," IIRC.

.יוֹרֵד גֶּשֶׁם
Yoréd gešem.
descend.[MSG.PRES] rain
"It's raining."

Not entirely true: there is the verbal root מָטַר which shows up throughout the Bible, with its original noun מָטָר (and is cognate to the Arabic مطر and Aramaic ܡܛܪ) with a similar meaning (i.e. Amos 7:4), but it's usually used in a causative binyan such as when God is threatening to flood places. Of course, it seems rather obvious that this is a very archaic verb/noun pair, and I tend to think neither is used in Modern Hebrew.

[Ser]

Keep in mind that the distinction between "cold rain" (or regular rain) and snow is a very loose in the Arab world, considering I can probably count on one hand the number of times it's rained here since I've lived here (and note, always in the winter, so winter = rainy season).

So over there it only rains around December? (And wow... that's really very little rain.... Much less than what I expected.)

This reminds me of El Salvador, where it mostly rains during summer and fall (May/June-October), although in colloquial language we call the rainy season invierno 'winter' anyway (and the dry season, from November to May/June, verano 'summer'; and yes even if we are on the northern hemisphere, and December is significantly colder than June, so verano 'summer' includes the coldest months of the year).

[Acid Badger]

In Italian, the noun is pioggia and the verb is piovere. When it rains, you say sta piovendo or simply piove.

[Legion]

French:
noun "pluie" ( < *ploia < *plovia < pluvia)
verb "pleuvoir" ( < plove:re)

[Bryan]

Hi guys,

So, this is really interesting stuff here. Please keep posting your insights on your languages.

So far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of languages seem to use the same root for both verb and noun, if not the actual same word. And, where languages use a different root for any given lexeme, this is against the general trend (e.g. English eat-food, but drink-drink, kick-kick, punch-punch, and so on)

And, where the same root is used, the verb seems to be the "basic", cf, Spanish "comer" (vb) and "comida" (n), which, as was pointed out helpfully earlier, is the participle, that is, "eaten".

DO ANY LANGUAGES do something like "eat" (vb) and "eat thing" (n)?

[Bob Johnson]

DO ANY LANGUAGES do something like "eat" (vb) and "eat thing" (n)?

Yes, Japanese, as mentioned above:

食べ物 or 食事 <tabemono> or <shokuji> both "eating thing"
食べる <taberu> "eat"

There's also 食う <kuu> "eat (roughly)" and ご飯 <gohan> "honorable rice; meal" but not terribly relevant

[Qwynegold]

Finnish has sade (rain N.) and sataa (rain V.); they seem to be derived from one another, but I don't know how. Then there's stuff like:

sataa lunta
rain snow.PTV
It snows.