Salaam to all, Kais says: "I would imagine from what I have been reading so far that diptote + triptote are pretty much standard terms."
That is true. But there are other efforts to make the idea more intelligible to students of the language. Antoine el-Dahdah, A Dictionary of Arabic Grammatical Nomenclature (Arabic to English). Librarie du Liban, translates "mamnoo3 min al-Saraf" as follows: Declined noun prohibited from variation. This is to underline the fact that, as we are all aware, such nouns are in fact not "indeclinable". Michael Mumisa, Introducing Arabic, Goodword Books, New Delhi, 2006, translates "munSarif" and "ghair munSarif" or "mamnoo3 min al-Saraf" as "Nunated noun" and "un-Nunated noun" respectively, to draw attention to the fact that the main difference between triptotes and diptotes is that only the former takes tanween. Prof. Alan Jones in "Arabic through the Quran" seems to favour "fully inflected" and "partially inflected". In my view, we may use any term as long as it properly defined and explained and understood. A lot of time may be lost in arguments resulting from misunderstanding the meaning of a term, as when you say "nominative" to mean "manSoob", or, as Br. Nizar Habash says when "people confuse syntactic case with the expression of case." > I would propse that the website's grammatical summary at a future date be > modified to also include the following additional information for the word > Ibrahim in this verse (as well as for other related words): > "The fourth word of verse (9:114) is a masculine proper noun and is in the > genitive case (مجرور). The case marker for this proper noun is a fatha > instead of a kasra, because the noun is a diptote (ممنوع من الصرف)." > I agree that the additional information you propose should be included. I would also suggest that in appropriate situations, the reason for a noun being of such and such a case be given: for example, "this noun is genitive because it is (mudhaf ilayh)" or to use the terminoloy used in the grammar section of this site, because "it is the dependent noun in a possessive construction." In this regard, the accusative case is the most troublesome, because there are so many reasons. But that is precisely why we need to include those reasons for the benefit of all students visiting the website. -- Abdul Rahman Adnan, Tel: +603-55136162 (House) +6012-2153800 (Mobile)
