Lesson 55 – الدَّرْسُ الخامِسُ وَالْخَمْسُونَ

The dual -  الْمُثَنَّى

The dual – الْمُثَنَّى

• We are still in lesson fifty five of our free Arabic language course. This Arabic course with images and audios will help you learn Arabic.

• The noun in Arabic is divided according to the number into three categories:
  1-The singular (المُفْرَد /al mufrad): which indicates one unit of the countable noun e.g.: (طَالِبٌ، مُعَلِّمٌ، كِتَابٌ، شَجَرِةٌ). All these words indicate the singular.
  2-The dual (الْمُثَنَّى /al muthannā/): which indicates two masculine or feminine units of the same kind of the singular noun, e.g.: (طَالِبانِ، مُعَلِّمانِ، كِتَابانِ، شَجِرِتانِ)
  3-The plural: which indicates more than two units of the singular noun, this will be studied In-Shā'-Allâh in the following lesson.
  Please take a look at the examples below:
  
  

• You may notice that we can change the dual form back to singular by simply removing the final (ان /ān) from its ending.

• We will see from the examples below that in the feminine form we also have to change the tā’ marbuŧah (if it is present) to a normal tā’ prior to adding the dual ending.  We will first review the examples of masculine dual form:
  
  

• Below, we can see that we form the feminine dual by adding the feminine ending (tā') before the dual ending (ان /ān/).  If the tā' in the singular is Marbūtah (ـة) it will be changed to normal tā' (ـت) before the dual ending (ان /ān/) let's see these examples of the feminine dual: