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Rain is raining

I'm in the middle of another quick trip to Ngukurr and this afternoon, as I had some quiet time to work on my own, it started to rain. Immediately, a relevant Marra phrase sprang to mind:

Gubijiji jil-ajurlu!


It is another nice little example of what a lovely language it is. While boring old English has the noun 'rain' and lazily uses that to make the verb 'to rain'/'raining', Marra is cleverer. There is the noun, gubijiji, and a special verb, jil-ajurlu, which means 'it's raining'.

So if I wanted to translate gubijiji jil-ajurlu into English in a literal way, I'd end up with:

Rain is raining.


What a primitive language English is! :-P  The rain is lovely though...

Comments

Anonymous said…
Yes and yuwei onkel. Amazing how quickly, as a mainstream society, we choose to discard thousands of years of human language development, eh?
3:42 am
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