"رَواد سورِيّ."
Translation:Rawad is Syrian.
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1285
In MSA the "un" is placed after words in the nominative/subjective case. It can be left off the last word in the sentence.
- 1629
People may have told you that only indefinite nouns take the final -n sound, but that is incorrect. Many definite nouns take them as well. It's the definite article that prevents the final -n from sticking to the word, but if a word is definite because it is a proper noun for example, then many proper nouns do take nunation. Feminine proper nouns and most proper nouns of foreign origin don't, however.
is the "-n" sound almost like the English "is" or is it something else? Just not sure when to use it
- 1629
When to use it is a complicated question about which you could fill a chapter of a book, but basically, noun cases are like the difference between "I" and "me," or "he" and "him," only applied to all the nouns. You say "kitaabun" ('a book') if you used the word "book" where you'd use "I" in a sentence, "kitaaban" where you would "me," and "kitaabin" where you would "my."
It's never wrong to leave it out, people often do when speaking Modern Arabic. It's the indefinite nominative case ending, so it indicates that Rawwad is the subject of the sentence and isn't definite.
Now I see that some response has been already provided to my question. Still, it seems to me that a nunation on a proper name is strange... It seems to say "A Rawad"...
- 1285
Why would nunation of a proper name sound any more strange than anything else in a completely new language that is foreign to us? Virtually everything in a new language family is new and different and therefore "strange".
It clearly says "Rawedun suurii". Maybe your mind is transferring the "a" sound in "Rawad" and you're "hearing" it in the wrong place. After listening to the sentence a few more times, I'm sure you'll hear it correctly.
- 1285
In English, a person from the country "Syria" is called a "Syrian". A person from Germany is called a German, from Belgium a Belgian, America an American, Arabia an Arabian. It's one of the patterns used for citizenship of people from countries whose names end in a vowel sound.
