Using the Arabic “tanvin” in Persian

Short link: fishuk.cc/tanvin

I wrote this “ad hoc” text as a comment on the platform “Chai and Conversation”, created by Leyla Shams for online teaching of the Persian language. On one of the forums for interaction between students, a girl from a country of Latin America (I forgot the names of the girl and of her country…) asked about the use of “tanvin”, a sign of Arabic origin, in the Persian language, and whose pronunciation is always “-an” (at the end of the words, most often adverbs). Even if her mother tongue was Spanish, and because I know some Arabic, I decided to help her in English hoping that my explanation would also be useful to other users. With little modifications, here is the full content of the “comment”, which fit for a separate post due to its length:

Source: Wikipedia.

[In Spanish] ¡Saludos! Te voy a responder en inglés para que otras personas también puedan ser ayudadas.

As you may suppose, Persian inherited many Arabic words keeping the original orthography, but changing their pronunciation. Look on the second letter (consonant) [of the word “lotfan” (لطفا)], tā: it has no sense of being in Persian, because it represents an Arabic glottal “t” absent in Persian. The same occurs when Western languages inherit English loanwords, without (at some degree) changing its orthography.

My learning path was quite different in the sense that I first learned the Arabic script, and then the Persian one. In this way, we can understand more easily some otherwise strange features. In written Arabic, there is a feature called “tanwiin”, i. e. a case marker which, with the indefinite sense (like the articles “a”, “un/a” etc.), makes pronounce a vowel followed by an “n” sound, though not written with the standard nuun letter.

Generally, these case markers are not pronounced in colloquial Arabic, but it is important to learn recognizing them. In Arabic, the marker “-an” means the accusative case, which also has some other functions, among them forming adverbs (more or less like the “-ly” in English and the “-mente” in Spanish and Portuguese). However, depending on the final words, this “doubled zebār” must come followed by a mute alef in Arabic, and so does in Persian.

Only to summarize, you must only keep in mind that this grapheme must always be pronounced “-an” and that it is generally an adverbial marker. Orthography, as in many languages, unfortunately must be just learned by heart, but indeed very few Persian words bear this feature. It can be found in many other common Arabic expressions, such as شكرا (shukran, “thank you”), عفوا (ᶜafwan, “please/you are welcome”) etc. In Arabic itself, “lotf” (لطف) means “kindness”, and its singular indefinite accusative form “lotfan” (لطفا) has the same meaning in Persian.

P.S. This feature is called “fatha tanwiin” in Arabic, because fatha is the Arabic name for the “a” vowel marker. Because Persian inherited only this marker (and not the marker tanwiin for the other vowels), it is just called “tanvin” (or “tanvin-e nasb”) and generally is written down with the double zebār above the alef. In Arabic, the tanwiin can ride either the (mute) alef or the final consonant.