# لا تنسني من صالح دعائك



## Afsar

أيتهما جملة صحيحة؟

لا تنساني في / من صالح دعائك


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## ahmadhandasa

*لا تنساني من صالح دعائك.*


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## figgles

لا أفهم
تنسَى = you forget
لا تنسَ = don't forget!

then why: لا تنساني

and not: لا تنسَني


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## cherine

It's just a common typo. You're right, it should be لا تنسني .


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## figgles

OK, thanks. What is the purpose of ـني on تنسَ? I remember seeing something like this before, but I can't recall what, but I do remember that it confused me then, too.


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## cherine

I don't remember all the details, but the nuun is called نون الوقاية because we can't add the yaa2 directly to the verb, for phonological/phonetic reasons.


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## figgles

OK, so is this conjugated for you (f) not you (m)?


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## cherine

تَنْسَني addresses the male. As for female أنتِ , the verb becomes لا تنسِني


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## figgles

OK, then I definitely don't understand why the ـني is there. It looks like "Don't forget me!"


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## cherine

The ي at the end refers to "me", it's not related to the gender of either the subject nor the object of the verb. The nuun is as I "explained" above. The verb itself, without the negation is تنساني for the masculine you, and تنسيني for the feminine. When in the jussive mode, the alef is elided from the masculine and the verb become tansani, and the yaa2 is elided from the feminine and the verb becomes tansini.


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## figgles

Thanks for being patient with me, Cherine. Grammatically, I understand the idea of ني = me as a direct object. It looks like I probably just don't understand the original sentence. 

Does the original sentence mean: "Don't forget the benefit/goodness of your prayer"? If so, then I don't understand the need for "ني".


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## analeeh

cherine said:


> تَنْسَني addresses the male. As for female أنتِ , the verb becomes لا تنسِني



I don't think this is right - the rule seems to be that a verb can only have one thing cut off it; this can either be a nuun or a long vowel. Since there's already a dropped nuun in the second person feminine the correct form is لا تنسيني _laa tansii-ni_.


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## Ghabi

Hello. "Don't forget!" to a female speaker is laa tansai, not laa tansii. This is due to the fact that the verb has the basic form nasiya, making it a bit different than verbs like ramaa (<--*ramaya). Compare "don't throw!" to a female speaker: laa tarmii. 

As to the "preserving nuun" (نون الوقاية) mentioned by Cherine, it was invented by the ancient grammarians to explain why the first-person singular pronoun has two forms (ii and nii): the nuun in nii is added to "preserve" the ending of a verb. Without the nuun, the verb-ending may be replaced by the pronoun (*yaf3alu-ii-->*yaf3alii?).

The original sentence in question seems to mean "don't forget me in your prayers"?


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## abdulwahid

> it was invented by the ancient grammarians



I'm a little bit confused about this. Do you mean that the said nuun wasn't used in pre grammarian Arabic?


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## analeeh

> Hello. "Don't forget!" to a female speaker is laa tansai, not laa tansii. This is due to the fact that the verb has the basic form nasiya, making it a bit different than verbs like ramaa (<--*ramaya). Compare "don't throw!" to a female speaker: laa tarmii.



Oh yes! Colloquials messing with all of us, it seems.



abdulwahid said:


> I'm a little bit confused about this. Do you mean that the said nuun wasn't used in pre grammarian Arabic?



I don't think so. Essentially, the Arabic grammatical tradition is very very keen on systematisation and regularity and being able to explain everything in a logical way. For this reason, it analyses the first person singular noun clitic _-ii_ and the first person singular verb clitic _-nii_ as underlyingly the same form (since all the other attached pronouns have the same forms) with an _-n-_ inserted before the latter. This is called the 'preserving nuun', and the justification they came up with for it was given by ghabi. Of course, languages do not usually work according to entirely logical, systematic patterns, and it seems to me more likely that there have always been two forms - but who knows.


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## cherine

figgles said:


> Does the original sentence mean: "Don't forget the benefit/goodness of your prayer"? If so, then I don't understand the need for "ني".


No, it means "don't forget to mention me in your du3aa2" (=to pray for me).


abdulwahid said:


> I'm a little bit confused about this. Do you mean that the said nuun wasn't used in pre grammarian Arabic?


No, it's the explanation that was invented. Early grammarians' work was basically descriptive.


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## dkarjala

analeeh said:


> I don't think so. Essentially, the Arabic grammatical tradition is very very keen on systematisation and regularity and being able to explain everything in a logical way. For this reason, it analyses the first person singular noun clitic _-ii_ and the first person singular verb clitic _-nii_ as underlyingly the same form (since all the other attached pronouns have the same forms) with an _-n-_ inserted before the latter. This is called the 'preserving nuun', and the justification they came up with for it was given by ghabi. Of course, languages do not usually work according to entirely logical, systematic patterns, and it seems to me more likely that there have always been two forms - but who knows.



There is no controversy about the existence of two first person suffixes in Proto-Semitic (perhaps -ya and -niya) as almost every Semitic language has the 'nuun waqiya' for a verbal suffix. Verbs ending in vowels made the 1sg suffix hard to pronounce, so the -n- was probably inserted (by analogy with the 1pl, perhaps) on those and then generalized on verbs. There are some ambiguities in Arabic that make the matter more interesting, such as the coexistence of انّي/انّني, but the explanation of the Arab grammarians more or less conforms to the European ones of the last century and a half.


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