Hello All, I am hoping we can continue this interesting discussion on the mailing list since the message board is not accepting new messages due to an upgrade over the next few days. Would anybody be interested in suggesting to this discussion list a suitable English translation for "mamnoo3 min al-Saraf"? This arises in the context of the diptote proper noun "Ibrahim" found in the Quran. For example, the fourth word of verse (9:114) is in the genitive case (majroor) but carries a fatha instead of a kasra as its case marker. In traditional Arabic grammar (i'rab) this is usually explained as:
"Ibrahim = majroor bi al-fatha, badalan min al-kasra li-annahu mamnoo3 min al-Saraf" At the moment, tagging nouns as diptotes (or triptotes) is being considered in a future later version of the Quranic Arabic Corpus, as part of more detailed morphological tagging. These would be morphological features (not part-of-speech tags). At present, the existing website shows equivalent English and Arabic terminology for the morphological and grammatical analysis for each word in the Quran. When we start tagging "mamnoo3 min al-Saraf", for Arabic I would suggest we stick to something along the lines above. However, for English I would be interesting to get some feedback. Would the below sound reasonable? For the proper noun "Ibrahim", the website currently states: "The fourth word of verse (9:114) is a masculine proper noun and is in the genitive case (مجرور)." 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)." Does this sound reasonable? I have often heard a related term being used, "indeclinable" but perhaps this would be a more suitable equivalent for term for "mabnee", e.g. "mabnee ala l-sukoon". I am looking forward to hearing people’s opinion on clear, accepted and standard terminology for ممنوع من الصرف. I would imagine from what I have been reading so far that diptote + triptote are pretty much standard terms. Would you agree, or perhaps wish to suggest something more closer to the original Arabic? There is a recent thread related to this on the website message board here: http://corpus.quran.com/wordmorphology.jsp?location=(9:114:4) If you would like to reply to this e-mail, it would be appreciated if you hit "reply all" and not just reply to me directly, so that we can discuss this on the mailing list. There is also some further insightful information below, from Dr. Nizar Habash at the Colubmia University. Looking forward to hearing people's opinions on this. Kind Regards, -- Kais Dukes Language Research Group School of Computing University of Leeds http://corpus.quran.com - The Quranic Arabic Corpus [email protected] - Computational Quranic Arabic discussion list > ---------------------------------------- > From: Nizar Habash[SMTP:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 8:20:11 PM > > Kais -- in my experience there are three common mistakes people make when > discussing diptotes: (1) people confuse syntactic case with the expression of > case. I tell my students to use manSuub/majruur/marfuu3 for syntactic case > and maftuuH/maksuur/maDmuum for the form of case; (2) people assume > diptotes are radically different from triptotes: Diptotes are like triptotes > except that when they are indefinite, they do not express morphological > nunation and they use the +a suffix for both ACC and GEN syntactic case. > This means when diptotes are definite (with Al+) or are the heads of idafa, > they are just like triptotes. (3) there are two types of "nunation": > syntactic and phonological. There are diptotes that actually have a nunation > that is argued by grammarians to be phonological not syntactic: these are > words with defective roots such as jawAriN (nominative/genitive).
