#deual

Helllooo! Sorry that this weeks is a little late!

Following on from last week's introduction of the dual, I thought it might be a good time to look at the dual form of verbs and the dual pronouns.

These are used for saying phrases like "both of you ate the food", "they both looked strange" etch., specifying two people! This is something built into the grammar, and all in all, it's not as common as other forms (how often do you refer to just 2 of something??) but it's an important feature of Arabic!

With that let's get started~

Dual Pronouns

The bad news - you have to learn another 2 pronouns. The good news - thankfully, the dual is used for both genders ( you don't have a separate pronoun to refer to"2 women", for example.) NOTE: if you are using a gendered dual ( e.g. 2 girls (البنتان)), then you must use the corresponding gendered verb. Only the pronouns are non-gender specific.

Here they are:

انتما

هما

the top one is 'antumma (you two) and the bottom is humma (them two).

Subject Verb agreement is very important in Arabic, so here's how to form a dual verb to match these pronouns.

Dual verbs

Like nouns, the dual marker with verbs is ـان. However, if the verb is in the accusative or the genitive (see this post for more info on cases), the ن is dropped. For example:

أكل -- يأكلان --تأكلان -- يأكلا--تأكلا

Above from right to left we have:

I/he ate (past tense sing/masc)

those two eat (masculine e.g. the two boys eat, nominative, present tense)

those two eat ( feminine, e.g. the two girls eat, nominative, present tense)

those two eat (masc, gen/acc, present)

those two eat (fem., gen/acc, present)

Try out some other form 1 verbs ( if you want to know more about forms, check out this post!)