Synchronous precipitation

["Colin Fine (Shape Data) 314-233-5399" <marob!uunet!SLDEV1!FINE>]

What synchronicity!
 I got back to the office after a week away, logged in, noticed a mail appear
from somebody I never heard of and guessed it was through lojban. Then I
started wading through a week of mails, and came upon John Cowan's main you
responded to.

I answered with the following:


Turkish: "Yagmur yagiyor" lit 'rain is raining'. You can also say 'snow
is raining' but I don't recall the word.

Then I got to the end of my new mail and saw what you had just sent:

In Turkish, "It's raining." is "G\"ok ya\ug\iyor.", which means "The
sky is raining.". "It's snowing." is "Kar ya\ug\iyor.", which means
"Snow is raining." A better translation for "ya\ug\iyor" is "is
precipitating", since the sentence "Ya\ugmur ya\ug\iyor." (literally
"Rain is raining.") also means "It's raining." I think hail and sleet
are also possible subjects.

Before the Turks converted to Islam (around 1500 I think), the main
deity was Te\ngri ("tanr\i" in modern Turkish, meaning "deity"), a sky
god.

Funny letters:

\"o	o-umlaut	pronounced as in German

\ug	"soft g"	almost silent, voiced velar fricative
			sometimes just lengthens the preceding vowel.

\i	dotless i	high back unrounded vowel, occurs in some
			varieties of Amer. "Yeucch!"

\ng	ng		as in "sing"

Stephen