Lexicon Valley How About This Weather?
Mar 1, 2022
A playful look at why English says "it" is raining and what that pronoun might point to. Cross‑linguistic examples show very different ways to talk about precipitation. Connections between weather words and time, music, and history trace surprising origins. Short linguistic sleuthing into evidentiality, aspect, and old word shifts rounds out the conversation.
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The Oddity Of 'It's Raining'
- English 'it's raining' uses a dummy pronoun 'it' that feels natural but is conceptually odd.
- John McWhorter shows this construction is common in Romance and Germanic languages but not universal.
Three Ways Languages Describe Rain
- Languages vary: some say 'it's raining', others 'rain goes', others 'rain is raining.'
- McWhorter maps these patterns across families like Romance, Germanic, Russian, and Latvian.
Mandarin Sees Rain As Having Happened
- McWhorter gives Mandarin 'xia yu le' as an example meaning roughly 'it has rained' rather than 'it's raining.'
- He uses this to show different linguistic perspectives on the same event.
