Hi,
Here's the summary. The source is al-NaHw al-waafiy, by Abbas Hasan,
12th edition (undated), Dar [EMAIL PROTECTED], 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Originally (I think he means once the dots had been replaced by other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
[EMAIL PROTECTED]"]..."
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
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