Marhaba! Right now, we're going to talk about how to use
verbs in the dual.
Once again, when we have exactly two of something in a sentence in formal Arabic,
we need to make sure that everything, nouns, pronouns, verbs,
etc.,
referring to those two
individuals or two objects, is
grammatically dual.
In spoken colloquial Arabics, you're unlikely to see
verbs conjugated in the dual, but in a formal written context, it is obligatory, it is considered incorrect
not to do it.
Mechanically, what happens is pretty simple. It's just a little addition to the templates that you already know. You'll notice that
the pronouns for
'those two' and 'you two' in both masculine and feminine are the same, so it's sort of up to us to infer from
context which one is being referred to. And there are only a couple of differences. For example, in the third-person,
the dual past-tense conjugations are different, as
they are here, with a 'yaa' instead of a 'taa' for the masculine and the feminine, respectively,
but the أنتما, the 'you two' conjugations are
pretty much the same, in fact
identical, for both
genders. So
don't be fooled, necessarily, it might be that you don't have a pronoun, or
the
subject isn't quite clear, in which case you would need to go and check elsewhere in a text before you made any good and certain
assumptions about whether it was masculine or feminine.
But context, as always, will be your guide.
Here a couple of examples of sentences that are in the singular: all of our
nouns and verbs are
in the singular, and I want to change them
to dual.
١. الطالب ذهب إلى الحفلة.
'The student went,' past tense,
'to the party.' Ah, but I want to make it two students. I would say then,
الطالبان
with my dual ending in the مرفوع,
ذهبا إلى الحفلة.
Well, let's suppose they went to two parties then.
Why not. إلى الحفلتَين.
Just for kicks. Now,
we have the ـَين ending, instead of the ـان ending, because the preposition إلى makes 'حفلة'
مجرور.
So, here I have الطالبان, and notice that they're masculine.
Two male, two grammatically masculine students, went, both of them, to the parties. If I had
two feminine students instead,
الطالبتان, but then then I would need to change the conjugation one more time and say ذهبتا
إلى الحفلتَين.
So that's our past tense conjugation.
Pretty simple. Second sentence:
هل تريدُ أن تلعبَ كرة القدم معي؟
تريدُ أن تلعبَ
would be our case endings in the singular, and this is important, because there is one extra wrinkle.
We have alternate conjugations in
the present tense for
مرفوع
and منصوب and مجزوم after certain particles like أن, or
لِـ, or لم, we're going to change things. And you'll notice that that, too, is very regular.
We just drop the 'nuun,' just like we do with the other
conjugations that have 'nuun' as part of their structure, their template, in the present tense. Like تذهبون .
If I wanted to say 'do you all want to come with me?' هل تريدون أن تذهبوا...
I would drop the 'nuun.' So I do the same thing here. Let's see how it works.
هل تريدان
مرفوع, because there's nothing in the sentence making it منصوب or مجزوم yet,
أنْ
now this particle أنْ makes the verb that follows be منصوب.
So I mark that منصوب with an alif.
...تلعبا كرة القدم معي؟
It's as simple as that. One little extra bit of structure that
we need to use when we are conjugating verbs in the dual. Once again,
verbs are not commonly conjugated in the dual in spoken dialect, spoken colloquial, but in
فصحى, in Modern Standard,Arabic, they are necessary if we are referring to exactly two of something
So it's just one more piece of the puzzle of being educated,
literate users of Arabic.