Arabic Grammar Nouns in Dual الاسم المثنى

Masaa' al-kheir! Right now, we're going to talk about dual nouns in Arabic. You may have seen preview of the dual, or you may know little bit about how nouns work, but here, we're going to talk about pretty much every single possibility that we could encounter in formal Arabic where we would need to modify dual noun, or anything that refers to it. In spoken colloquial, we tend only to use the dual when it comes to nouns and the adjectives that describe them, but in العربية الفصحى، Modern Standard Arabic, we need to modify pretty much every single particle in sentence that refers back to those nouns. It's not optional. It's considered incorrect if we don't do that. If we were talking about the relationship between 'two countries,' for example, or 'two people,' we would need to make all the adjectives dual, we would need to make all the verbs that those two things or individuals did together dual, etc. Right now, we're only talking about nouns. Nouns and pronouns. Here is chart with most of the situations you will ever encounter, most of the alternatives that we will need in المثنّى and now in this column, and for reference here is المفرد, the singular version of all of these forms. So as you can see, we have different subject pronouns, we have different object pronouns, we have different ending that we would put onto regular noun--I've chosen كتاب and سيارة, 'book' and 'car,' as two fairly normal nouns, that hopefully, you know. Different relative pronouns: instead of الذي and التي in singular, we have different versions, and different demonstrative pronouns as well. It's pretty linear. In fact, you could argue that in some cases it's bit simpler, because for example the subject pronoun forms هو and هي are different, but in the dual, they're not. We can use the same version. Excuse me, there is typo here. The same is true for the second person subject pronouns. It is أنتما that we have, not هما once again. There is one little wrinkle. Which is that for nouns, and relative pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns, we have two versions that we could use, depending on whether the word in given instance in particular sentence is مرفوع, or منصوب, or مجرور. We have videos about all of those terms and when we can, when we should expect to use them in fully vocalized sentence. You can go check those out if you need refresher. Basically, if noun or some kind of pronoun is in the مرفوع case, the ending is going to be ان. One book, كتاب, two books, كتابان. If it's in منصوب or مجرور, it's going to take the same, slightly modified ending, ـَين, instead. With 'fatha' followed by 'yaa' and 'nuun,' instead of an 'alif' and 'nuun.' This may seem like lot of information, but luckily it's fairly regular. We can see that that is true for nouns, for relative pronouns, excuse me relative pronouns, اللذان اللذين, اللتان اللتَين, and also for demonstrative pronouns. هذان، هذَين، هتان، هتَين. So all we're doing is taking that 'alif,' and flattening it out, from ان to ـَين. Let's take look at couple of examples. have some sentences here that are written in the singular, and what we're going to do is try to modify all of the nouns and pronouns in the sentence to talk about two things instead. Here's number one: هذه هي المقالة التي قرأتُها منذ أسبوع. 'This is the article that read week ago,' or 'one week ago.' Now suppose want to say 'these are the two articles that read two weeks ago.' We have to change bunch of things in this sentence. هذه, just for one feminine singular object, so instead would say هتان هما, 'these here are the two articles,' المقالتان Notice that so far we only have مرفوع endings. We haven't had any prepositions, We haven't had any verbs, that they're the object of, so we can stick with مرفوع. التي is going to switch to اللتان am still singular, read them, قرأتُ, but read two of them, not one, so need that object pronoun for two, قرأتهما, منذ, not one week ago, two weeks ago, منذ أسبوعَين. This is مجرور because of منذ. منذ أسبوعَين, in this construction منذ is preposition, and this is technically sort of an إضافة. 'ago two weeks.' So as you can see we would need to sort of change one, two, three, four, five, six different things in the sentence, but it's all pretty predictable and pretty regular. And the same rules could be applied to any other situation of the dual. Let's take another look. تعرّفتُ على أستاذ الاقتصاد في الحفلة. Here is one other wrinkle as with other regular plural endings, like the ون ين ending that we would use for regular masculine plural, if we have word that takes one of those regular plurals, that ends with 'nuun' and It's part of an إضافة that isn't the final word, we are going to drop that 'nuun.' So would say تعرّفت على... We have preposition here, so if made أستاذ in the dual, ordinarily would add that ـَين ending, مجرور because of the preposition, but here I'm finishing the إضافة with الاقتصاد, 'two professors of Economics.' So what need to do is drop that 'nuun,' and wind up with أستاذَي الاقتصاد. The rest of our sentence remains the same. Here is the nice long one. 'Do you know the new student that wants to study with us.? هل تعرف الطالب الجديد الذي يريد أن يدرس معنا؟ Let's put the case endings on these verbs, because it's also going to be important. We have separate video about verbs in the dual, but this can be kind of an introduction. Okay. هل تعرف الطالب الجديد. Well, تعرف is verb and الطالب الجديد is منصوب because it's the object of that verb, المفعول به. So we're going to say instead, هل تعرف الطالب... But now need my dual ending, it's منصوب, الطالبَين الجديدَين Now have this pronoun here الذي, 'that,' the two students 'who, or 'that,' the relative pronoun, so here, need, again, the منصوب version because الطالبَين الجديدَين, the noun that it's referring to, is منصوب, اللذَينَ And here, I'm going to conjugate the verbs differently as well. I'm running out of space here, اللذَينَ يريدان أن يدرسا معنا. Long sentence. هل تعرف الطالبَين الجديدَين اللذَين يريدان أن يدرسا معنا؟ It's, it's, bit contrived, but it gets the point across, right? 'Do you know the two new students, who, both of them, want to study with us?' Notice that we do have different verb forms in the dual as well, for the مرفوع and the منصوب verbs. You can see more examples of that in our video on verbs in dual, because they tend to have their own specific patterns as well. Once again, it can seem like lot of information to absorb all at once, but if you practice just converting some simple sentences from the singular to the dual, you'll discover that it really is very regular process, and we can count on seeing the same patterns. There aren't too many strange exceptions floating around.