FS

10th May, 2011

Can we change this to something other than INTG since there is not a question being asked as such here.

Wallahu a'alam

FS

10th May, 2011

Just thinking do we label here as INTG and then account for it not being an INTG in the treebank section? If so please ignore the above suggestion.

Kais

10th May, 2011

Salamu Alaykum,

Although this might appear odd at first sight, the existing analysis on this page (and in the treebank) is in fact correct. The traditional i'rab for this word is "kayfa: ism istifhaam khabar kaana". You can read that Arabic analysis online at this website by clicking "Syntactic Treebank" and then "Grammar (i'rab)" under that section. So this word has been correctly tagged as INTG - ism istifhaam, and the treebank correctly shows this word as "khabar kaana". In general, there are certain words in Arabic grammar that are known as "ism istifhaam" yet do not participate in a Question, but take other roles in a sentence.

Having said, I do agree that we should add additional information to this page to make this clear. Once the treebank is complete, we will inshallah included syntactic roles on this page. So when that happens, perhaps we can add something like the following:

Syntactic Role: This part has been tagged as an interrogative noun (INTG), known as ism istifhaam. In this verse, this word does not participate directly in a question, as it has the syntactic role of a predicate of kaana (khabar kaana).

How does that sound?

FS

10th May, 2011

Wa alaykum salaam, yes it does seem strange but it makes sense to see why you want to leave it that way, since all grammar books label it as such. I think the idea to include a syntactic roles page would be most beneficial, and the syntactic role description you've put here is very clear.

wallahu a'alam

Kais

10th May, 2011

Great. Going forward, I think we can discuss further ideas for the new syntactic roles section. The idea I had was that for each word on the Quran, on this page (the word details page) we have a new section called "Syntactic Role" just between the grammar at the top, and where the full verse is listed on this page. Then, for each word, we would specify what its role is and the reason why it is accusative, nominative, genitive etc. Or for verbs, the reason why the word is subjunctive, jussive, etc. So inshallah, if you feel the need to discuss this on the messageboard for other words, it would be very helpful to say "Syntactic Role: ..." in your message - this will help us build up a list of possible examples to assist with future automatic processing of this by computer.

Mazhar A. Nurani

10th May, 2011

Its translation is also suggestive of its nomenclature

"how"-used to ask or report questions or to introduce statements about the manner in which something happens or is done