Esperanto · Chapter 16 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
La vetero
Rain, snow, wind and sun. The weather words, and the verbs that describe the sky with no subject at all: pluvas, negxas, ventas.
Practise this lesson
16-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Pluvas: the verbs with no one to do them
Pluvas. That is a whole sentence. It means "it is raining", and if you go looking for the word that translates the English "it", you will not find it, because it was never there. English needs a grammatical stooge to stand at the front of the sentence - "it" rains, "it" snows - even though that "it" does nothing and refers to nothing. Esperanto declines to hire one. The verb rains, and the rain does the raining, and no pronoun is asked to pretend otherwise.
The verb with no one behind it
is rain, the noun. Turn the root into a verb and you get pluvas: rains, is raining. There is no subject because there is nothing to be the subject. The same trick runs straight through the weather. is snow, so neĝas is "it is snowing". is wind, so ventas is "it is windy". You are not omitting a word you could have said; you are noticing that English inserts one it does not need. When the sky delivers weather, the weather is the entire event, and Esperanto lets the verb carry it alone.
This is not a special exception you must memorise verb by verb. It falls straight out of the grammar. A sentence does not require a subject; it requires a predicate. Weather is the cleanest case where you have the second without the first.
Then there is no noun to agree with
Here is the part that catches people out, and it is worth slowing down for. Suppose you want to say "it is warm". is the adjective, warm. But an adjective in Esperanto agrees with a noun - it exists to describe one. In "it is warm" there is no noun. There is no "it". So has nothing to attach to, and using it would leave the -a ending dangling in mid-air, agreeing with nobody.
So you reach for the adverb instead: . Warm-ly, if you like - it describes the state of affairs rather than a thing. e, it is cold. nebule, it is foggy, from . The -e ending is doing exactly what it always does: modifying the situation as a whole when there is no noun in sight. Say and a careful Esperantist will wince, because you have promised an adjective a noun and then not delivered one.
Put it together
Pluvas, e. - It is raining, and it is cold.
neĝas; . - In winter it snows; in summer the sun shines.
Ventas, nebule . - It is windy, and it is foggy by the sea.
Aŭtune pluvas, . - In autumn it often rains, but today it is warm.
