Lesson 55 – الدَّرْسُ الخامِسُ وَالْخَمْسُونَ

The dual -  الْمُثَنَّى

Conditions of the dual, and how to form it – شُرُوط الْمُثَنَّى وَكَيْفِيَّة تَثْنِيَتِهِ

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• We learnt in part 2 of this lesson that the Arabic dual is a declinable noun indicating two units of masculine or feminine singular noun, and it is formed by adding /ān/ or /ayn/  to its end, e.g.: (رَجُلانِ ، اِمْرَأَتَيْنِ).  We also  learnt that if the dual ending is removed we find the singular form with all letters and vowels, as we notice in the following examples:
  
  

• In all the above mentioned examples we can get the singular simply by omitting the dual ending; /ān – ayn/.

• We will now learn that not all the words ending with /ān – ayn/ are necessarily dual, there are some words that have the dual ending but are not dual, rather they are a singular noun as in the following table:
  
  

• These above mentioned words are not dual, they indicate names of persons or months, so we cannot remove the /ān/ from their endings, otherwise the meaning will be different. This is what we mentioned earlier – i.e. that one of the conditions of a dual is the possibility of omitting the dual ending without changing the meaning of the word – i.e. only the quantity is changed by omitting the dual ending from two units to one unit.

• The second condition of forming the dual is that the noun has to be a singular noun, i.e. not dual, it’s not possible to form a dual from another dual, see examples showing what is and is not possible:
  
  

• The dual also cannot be formed from the plural noun, being broken plural (جمع تكسير /ĵamξ taksīr/), sound masculine plural (جمع مذكر سالم /ĵamξ muthakkar sālim/), or sound feminine plural (جمع مؤنث سالم /ĵamξ mu’annath sālim/), see these examples:
  
  

• Another condition of forming the dual, is that it must be declinable noun (اسْم مُعْرَب ism muξrab) not indeclinable.

• We learnt the indeclinable nouns earlier and we studied that they are divided in six categories, we studied these categories in many lessons as follows:
  
  

• none of the above mentioned indeclinable nouns can form the dual except the following:
  1-The following demonstratives:
  
  

• You may remember that the demonstrative singular masculine noun is (هذا /hādhā) – meaning ‘this is’ - when we add the ending (ان /ān) to it, it indicates the dual masculine – i.e. ‘these two are’ The demonstrative singular feminine (هذه /hādhihī/) can also be dual , but with a certain change in its form (هاتان /hātāni/)

• The following relative nouns can also form the dual, exceptionally from the indeclinable nouns:
  
  

• We notice here that the relative noun (الَّذِي ) is used after a singular masculine noun, while (اللذان) is used after a dual masculine noun. Despite the fact that the singular is otherwise an indeclinable noun, we add to it the dual ending (ان /ān/) to indicate the dual relative noun.

• The same rule applies to (الَّتي) - it also comes after the feminine singular noun, and when we add (ان /ān) it becomes a dual feminine relative noun.