Mdthbs

As a Spanish speaker and an admirer of the English language, I am always trying to know and understand more, but sometimes, something appears and I just cannot understand it, in this case, I looked for an answer in the Internet without success, so I come to you for help.

Why the word "rain" is considered a verb if it is not possible to conjugate it?

Why the word "rain" is considered a verb if it is not possible to conjugate it?

Rain as a verb acts like any other regular English verb. English verbs don't have much in the way of conjugation, but there are 4 forms.

Third-person singular: rains

Past tense/past participle: rained

Present participle/gerund: raining

Everything else: rain.

The subject of rain is usually the indefinite it.

It is raining today.

English verbs require the subject to be expressed always unless the mood is imperative.

Some other languages with more elaborate conjugation schemes (like Spanish) allow the subject in non-imperatives to be omitted sometimes, since the verb conjugation provides information, but not English.

It's possible for other things to rain, especially if they are liquid and are behaving like rain. This is typically figurative.

Tears rained from the dragon's eye.

Blood rained from the sky as the monsters fought.

English does not really have conjugations with the exception of the verb to be.

English has a morpheme in the third-person singular present tense (an s or es in written form):

• It rains a lot here.




• It does not rain a lot here.




• Does it rain a lot where you live?

Those are all the verb rain in the present tense.

Other languages have conjugations. Not English. Except for what is explained above, there is no conjugation. Conjugations are for Romance and other languages. English has verb forms and tenses. raining is a verb form, a gerund or used in continuous tenses (It is raining.//It has been raining, for example) and rained is a verb tense. It rained yesterday. Simple past.

The verb rain is a regular verb which means an ed is added to rain to make it into a simple past.

I wouldn't say it's impossible to conjugate "to rain". It usually doesn't make sense to say, for example, "I rain", but there are certain circumstances in which other subjects are used with the verb.

Sometimes, the verb can take a meaning similar to "shower", as in "I shower him with praise" being similar to "I rain praise unto him". It's an uncommon figurative usage of the verb, but hardly impossible.

In some languages (I think some Romance Languages), "to rain" really only takes "it" or "he" as a pronoun, like the french "pleuvoir". This isn't exactly the case in English, but it's uncommon to hear any other pronouns simply because "to rain" is a very specific verb describing a very specific process. For example, in English, you'd never hear "We photosynthesize", since that makes no sense.

Example of an English verb that really does not have certain conjugations:

Can (Past tense of "can" usually is replaced with "was able to", "could", etc., and future is usually said as "will be able to", "shall", and other phrases that seem unrelated to the infinitive.

"rain" is considered a verb because it goes where other verbs go, and not where a verb can't go, except where identified as another class of word.

Noun

• the cloud
  


• the clouds
  


• the air (uncountable)


• the rain
  


• the rains (usually uncountable, but countable "rain" is possible)

Verb

• it eats
  


• it is eating
  


• it ate
  


• it is going to eat
  


• it rains
  


• it is raining
  


• it rained
  


• it is going to rain
  

Adjective

• the bus is big and red


• the big red bus


• *the bus is rain and red


• *the rain red bus (in "the rain cloud", "rain" is a noun adjunct)

So, out of the three word classes we've looked at, "rain" can be a noun or a verb, but not an adjective.

It is still possible to say "I rain", "we rain", etc. "I rain my blessings upon you", so it can be conjugated too.