Hi Greg, Many thanks for this.
> 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 Originally (I think he means once the dots had been replaced by other 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. 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 _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
