tanween details

[Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>]

Hi,

Here's the summary.  The source is al-NaHw al-waafiy, by Abbas Hasan, 
12th edition (undated), Dar al-Mar at arif, Cairo, volume 1, pages 26ff.

Originally (I think he means once the dots had been replaced by other 
marks), it was written with an ordinary, full-sized nuun, as is 
sometimes done in poetry.  Then they decided to replace the nuun with an 
abbreviated symbol, namely a second damma, fatha, or kasra, in order to 
avoid confusion between this extra nuun and other sorts of nuun.

This nuun is considered saakina (quiescent) and za'ida (extra); extra 
because it is not one of the original letters of the word, and

	"this nuun - even if it is a single letter - is considered a complete 
word ... just like the conjunctive waw and fa, the genitive bi,  and 
other "lexical letters" [my translation; the original is Hufuuf 
al-ma at aniy"]..."

Which provides a justification for omitting the tanween in an idaafa 
construction, since you can't have another word between the two terms of 
an idaafa, except when [etc. - there's always an exception!].

If I get ambitious I'll type up the text (a little over a page) with a 
translation.

Seems to me that this text, from the authoritative contemporary grammar 
of Arabic, provides pretty strong justification for encoding a tanween 
codepoint in Unicode.

-gregg