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Re: tanween details
- To: "General Arabization Discussion" <general at arabeyes dot org>
- Subject: Re: tanween details
- From: "Thomas Milo" <t dot milo at chello dot nl>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:50:29 +0200
Hi Greg,
Many thanks for this.
> 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 Originally (I think he means once the dots had been replaced by other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.
Please do, would appreciate it - a scan would help as well
> Seems to me that this text, from the authoritative contemporary
> grammar of Arabic, provides pretty strong justification for encoding
> a tanween codepoint in Unicode.
Still it would be nice to have a second source for this. Nevertheless, it
helps me to move back towards the idea of a tanwiin codepoint, which IMHO
logically leads to a tamwiim and an idghaam point.
t