Rain, Rain, Go Away Trivia Quiz

Answer:

You may notice some similarities between different languages, a phenomenon related to what linguists refer to as language families. The Indo-European family, which includes many European languages, has a number of branches. French (la pluie) and Italian (la pioggia) are Romance languages, with many words descending from Latin (pluvia) words. Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian are also Romance languages. The northern part of Europe includes a number of regions where the languages are Germanic, including English (rain), German (regnen), Dutch (regen), Swedish, Norwegian and Danish (all using regn). Slavic languages such as Polish (deszcz), Russian, Ukranian, Czech, Bulgarian and Serbian are spoken in Central and Eastern Europe. Breton (glav) is a Celtic language, related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Latvian (lietus) is a Baltic language.

Not all European languages are in the Indo-European family. Finnish (sade) is a Uralic language (a family found in northern Asia) - which also includes Hungarian and Estonian. Basque (euria) is a language isolate - it does not appear to be linguistically related to any other living languages.

In some languages, inanimate objects are given genders. In Romance languages, the rain is usually feminine; in Germanic languages it is usually masculine.

In English, the same word is used for both the noun rain, and the verb describing the process of precipitation, to rain. This is by no means universally true, but often the two words resemble each other (French la pluie, pleuvoir; German der regen, regnen).

It is also interesting to note that different levels of rain intensity are described in words that relate to the original term in various ways. In English, for example, a light rain might be called that, or a drizzle - a word whose origins are unclear, but used since the 16th century. Italian uses a diminutive form (la pioggerella) of the main word (la pioggia); in Latvian, it is smalks lietus. Although Swedish, Norwegian and Danish all use the same word for rain, they use different terms to describe a light rain: the Swedish term is duggregn, Danish støvregn, and Norwegian småregn.

The incorrect options are the words for rain in Igbo (Mmiri ozuzo), Zulu (imvulu) and Wolof (taw), all languages spoken in the African continent; Indonesian (hujan), Filipino (ulan) and Hawaiian (ua), all languages of Pacific Ocean islands; and Quecha (para), spoken in South America.