Arabic nunation
Sign in to saveAlso known as tanween, ً, ٌ, ٍ, tanwīn, nunation
Nunation (, ''), in some Semitic languages such as Arabic, is the addition of one of three diacritics (cf. ḥarakāt) to a noun or adjective in order to indicate that the word ends in a sequence of a vowel and an alveolar nasal. Thus, the presence of a consonant is exceptionally expressed without the addition of the corresponding letter (which otherwise normally would have been nūn''). The sequences marked by the diacritics represent case endings (nominative, accusative and genitive). The noun phrase is fully declinable and syntactically unmarked for definiteness, identifiable in speech.
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Encyclopedic overview
6 sectionsContents
- Literary Arabic
- Xiao'erjing
- Akkadian language
- Character encodings
- See also
- References
Nunation (, ''), in some Semitic languages such as Arabic, is the addition of one of three diacritics (cf. ḥarakāt) to a noun or adjective in order to indicate that the word ends in a sequence of a vowel and an alveolar nasal. Thus, the presence of a consonant is exceptionally expressed without the addition of the corresponding letter (which otherwise normally would have been nūn''). The sequences marked by the diacritics represent case endings (nominative, accusative and genitive). The noun phrase is fully declinable and syntactically unmarked for definiteness, identifiable in speech.
== Literary Arabic ==
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Arabic nunation” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.