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

[Bryan]

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

Whoops. "Apple-loagies"

[Rui]

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

People have mentioned German already, so I'll just do Mandarin:

'eat' is most commonly 吃 chi1 (你吃了吗？ ni3 chi1 le ma? 'have you eaten?')
食 shi2 can also mean 'eat,' but more commonly occurs in compounds to indicate food items: 主食 zhu3 shi2 'staple food'

饭 fan4 technically means "food," but I think it refers more to "meal," AND it also means "rice" (cf. 米饭 mi3 fan4, 'cooked rice'). It is also the character used in the compounds meaning 'breakfast' 早饭 (zao3 fan4, 'early food'), 'lunch' 午饭 (wu3 fan4, 'noon food'), and 'dinner' 晚饭 (wan3 fan4 'late food').

餐 can1 also means "food," and in the case of the meal terms as actually equivalent to 饭 (早餐，午餐，晚餐). It is also used in the compound meaning 'cafeteria' (餐厅 can1 ting1 'food room'), as well as 'fast food' (快餐 kuai4 can1 'fast food)

Different areas of China also have the term 小吃 xiao3 chi1 ('little eat') which can have a broad range of meanings, IIRC. The one that I learned in Chinese classes was "snack" or those small things you get at street vendor carts, stuff like that.

My dictionary also lists 吃食 (chi1 shi2) as a "spoken" word for "food"...obviously combining both characters for 'eat.' But it also lists 'to feed' as a definition, so I'm not sure if it necessarily refers to animal food? Don't quote me on this one, better to wait for a native speaker's judgment.

The closest translation to 'eat thing' I can think of is 吃的东西 (chi1 de dong1 xi1 'eat REL thing), but that means something more along the lines of "something to eat" or like "the thing you eat/ate..." (你吃的东西。。。ni3 chi1 de dong1 xi1)...

Actually wait, my dictionary (actually, it's http://www.nciku.com) also lists 食物 (shi2 wu4 'eat thing') as a word for 'food'...but I haven't learned that, so I'm not sure how common it is.

Leave it to the Chinese to have the most complicated system of words for things dealing with food and eating

[Ser]

食 shí can mean food too, in compounds, and in Literary Chinese. 食物 shíwù is definitely common for "food".

[Terra]

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

To clarify, "tabe" is the native reading of 食, and "shoku" the Han (Chinese) reading.

[Hakaku]

To complement Japanese, here's a few other Japonic variants:

Kagoshima:
く ku or たもっ tamoq "eat"
きもん kimon "food"

Amami:
かむり kˣamuri "eat"
かみむん kˣamimun or ぼいむん boïmun "food"

Okinawan:
くゎいん kwain or かむん kamun "eat"
くぇーむん kweemun "food"

Miyako:
ふぉー foo "eat"
ふぉーむぬ foomunu "food"

As you can note, 物 (mono, mon, mun, munu) "thing" is a pretty productive term, being used in all varieties despite the different root verbs. You can easily form other words this way by simply changing the verb (e.g. standard: nomu "(to) drink" > nomimono "drink, beverage").

Cree uses a similar word formation process, using -win for nominalization:
mîciw ᒦᒋᐤ "(he/she) eats"
mîciwin ᒦᒋᐃᐧᐣ "food"

[Bryan]

Hi Hakaku,

Is -win a bound morpheme?

[adder]

In Polish it's also possible that a verb and a noun derive from the same stem although there's no pair like "rain" and "to rain". But:

eat - jeść
food - jedzenie

However, as I'm thinking of it, the ending is a classical example of a gerund ending, i.e. robić (to do) - robienie (doing), śpiewać (to sing) - śpiewanie (singing). Nonetheless "jedzenie" doesn't have to describe the act of eating, it may also be translated as "food" like I wrote, it depends where it's used.

Więzień odmawia przyjmowania jedzenia. - The prisoner refuses to take food.
Więzień odmawia jedzenia. - The prisoner refuses to eat.

Something else came to my mind concerning "raining" and other types of precipitation. "Ulewa" means "downpour of rain" and it comes from the same stem as the verb "lać" of which one of the meanings is "to pour", it is then used exclusively in 3SG - "leje". The similarity is obvious.

[linguoboy]

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.

I don't know that it's even true for the majority of Indo-European languages. Counterexamples have already been given for Slavic. Welsh does have the verb glawio, derived from glaw "rain", but IME it's seldom used (and may be a recent calque). The usual expression is bwrw glaw "casting rain". (Cf. bwrw eira "snowing", bwrw cenllysg/cesair "hailing", etc.) It's the same in Irish: Theoretically, there is a verb báistigh, but it has no finite forms; it only occurs as a verbal-noun (i.e. An raibh sé ag báisteach? "Was it raining?"). The usual expression combines this with the verb cuir "throw", e.g. Bíonn sé ag cur báistí/fearthainne i gcónaí "It's always throwing rain". Similarly for Albanian (po bie shi "PROG fall rain"), Persian (barun miyad "rain comes"), Punjabi (varkhā ho rahi hai lit. "rain be staying is"), etc.

Furthermore, Korean works the same as Japanese: 비가 왔다 /pi ka oass.ta/ "rain came" = "it rained". We've seen nominal expressions from Chinese and Vietnamese as well. On the other hand, Indonesian hujan functions as both noun and verb. Osage also lacks a strict morphological distinction between the two categories. Níižu (from níi "water") can become a predicate simply with the addition of a progressive marker, i.e. níižu akxai "it is raining".

Clearly, many languages have a verb for "rain", but it is by no means obvious to me that a "majority" do, much less an "overwhelming" one. I would think the same applies to other case (like "snow" or "eat") as well.

[Bryan]

Hi Linguoboy, I was referring to examples such as a drink/eat/hit/kick etc.

[Io]

The Bulgarian word for rain is дъжд, the word for to rain is вали, it's also used for to snow, you can specify what is falling from the sky by saying вали дъжд/град/сняг (rain/hail/snow) when it's not too obvious. In Greek you have βρέχει and βροχή for rain, and for snow χιονίζει (v) χιόνι (n).

The verb for eat is ям/яда, the words for food are ядене, храна, in Greek you have τρώ(γ)ω (v) and for food τροφή, φαγητό, note that the perfective form of the verb τρώ(γ)ω is φάω.

[Hakaku]

Hi Hakaku,

Is -win a bound morpheme?

Yeah, Cree is polysynthetic/fusional, so pretty much everything is bound. The suffix -win- tends to create more abstracted concepts, while -kan- tends to form physical objects (such as tools and instruments), and -(i)hkân helps form new nouns from other nouns (e.g. (my) eyes > (my) glasses). There's some others too, but I'm not familiar with all of them.

[ná'oolkiłí]

In Georgian, "rain (n)" is წვიმა c̣vima; "it rains" is წვიმს c̣vims. The verb never takes any arguments. I suppose the noun is actually the verb's masdar.
As for eating, there's ჭამს č̣ams "s/he eats it" and საჭმელი sač̣meli "food". სა—ელი forms the future participle. The vowel dropping out of the root is an example of syncope, which is pretty widespread in the language.

[Skomakar'n]

All of Northern Germanic except for Icelandic use the stem regn- for both. Icelandic has 'regn' for the noun and 'rigna' for the verb.

As a side-note, Faroese, for some reason, has more or less lost the old, Germanic word for 'snow' (in Faroese 'snjógvur') replaced with 'kavi', while all of the others cling on to their respective cognate to the English 'snow'. Not sure whence it comes, but at least 'kaf' is a word for 'sea' in Icelandic ('kafa' means 'to dive' and 'kafari' means 'diver'), so maybe that's related.

[Astraios]

You posted about kavi before, and we discovered it's from the same root as kafa.

[Skomakar'n]

You posted about kavi before, and we discovered it's from the same root as kafa.

Really? I don't remember that. Very well, then. There we go. Again. Apparently.

[Turtlehead]

All of Northern Germanic except for Icelandic use the stem regn- for both. Icelandic has 'regn' for the noun and 'rigna' for the verb.

As a side-note, Faroese, for some reason, has more or less lost the old, Germanic word for 'snow' (in Faroese 'snjógvur') replaced with 'kavi', while all of the others cling on to their respective cognate to the English 'snow'. Not sure whence it comes, but at least 'kaf' is a word for 'sea' in Icelandic ('kafa' means 'to dive' and 'kafari' means 'diver'), so maybe that's related.

So is rain and reign a cognate?


On another note most Maori words can be both verbs and nouns depending upon what goes in front of it.

[Skomakar'n]

So is rain and reign a cognate?

Not as far as I know. Pretty sure rich and reign are, though.

[Bryan]

Hi turtlehead,

Yeah, I'm actually reading up on Maori grammar as it seems to share a lot with what I am trying to do.

[Turtlehead]

Hi turtlehead,

Yeah, I'm actually reading up on Maori grammar as it seems to share a lot with what I am trying to do.

E hia a te reo tau? (Sorry no Macrons)

Probably most polynesian languages would share the same structures.

[Bryan]

Hi turtlehead,

Yeah, I'm actually reading up on Maori grammar as it seems to share a lot with what I am trying to do.

E hia a te reo tau? (Sorry no Macrons)

Probably most polynesian languages would share the same structures.

??"How many the language you"???
= How many languages do you speak???????

As I say, "looking into", not "learning". Altho naturally you just sort of end up remembering a few bits and pieces. Random words, mostly. wahine, nga tamariki, tangata, whaka, iwi, kiau etc.

Out of interest, are you of Maori ancestry?

[----]

In Turkish 'rain' is yağmur, and there is a verb yağmak which means to fall. "It's raining" would be Yağıyor, 'it's falling' with the rain being implied by context. This same verb can also be used for other types of precipitation, snow, sleet, insects, etc.
Similarly, 'food' and 'to eat' are both yemek, and 'to drink' and 'a beverage' are içmek and içecek, respectively.

[Bryan]

Hi Theta,

What about other English n-vb pairs; how do they translate in Turkish?

kick
paint
talk
etc

[----]

Hey Bryan!

kick/a kick - tekmelemek/tekme
paint/paint (substance) - boyamak/boya
talk/a chat - konuşmak/konuşma
school/to study - okul/okumak

There are quite a few ways to derive nouns from verbs or vice versa, so it's not really constant the way that they're made.

[Skomakar'n]

kick/a kick - tekmelemek/tekme

That could have been Hungarian!

[L'alphabētarium]

kick/a kick - tekmelemek/tekme

That could have been Hungarian!

~ LOL - I agree! ~

In Greek it's:
τρώω/τρέφω ['tɾo.o/'tɾe.fo] - (to) eat/(to) feed [v]
τροφή/φαγητό [tɾo.'fi/fa.ʝi.'to] - food [n]
(ο)μιλώ [(o).mi.'lo] - (to) talk/(to) chat [v]
ομιλία - [o.mi.'li.a] - speech/talk [n]
βρέχει ['vɾe.çi] - (to) rain [v]
βροχή [vɾo.'çi] - rain [n]
χιονίζει - [ço.'ni.zi] - (to) snow [v]
χιόνι ['ço.ni] - snow [n]