Question

Why is the word two spelled sometimes with an alif , and with or without a on the end, as in .  Does this affect the meaning?  Are there any other spellings of ?  Do all numbers follow this pattern in the Qur’an?

Answer

The word two in Arabic does have some different appearances depending on its grammatical place in the sentence and whether it is adjucted to another word, such as the Arabic word for twelve . 

Starting with the plain word for two, there are four different ways this word is written depending on its grammatical place in the sentence, and whether it is referring to masculine two or feminine two.   and  are both words for a masculine “two”.  In the example on the left, it has a for the next to the last letter, and in the right hand example, there is an alif for the next to the last letter.  They mean the exact same “two”, but their grammatical significance is different.   

The feminine word for “two” is .  The only difference between this and the masculine is the  added third letter from the end of the word.  It too can be written with the as second to the last letter or an alif, depending on its grammatical place in the sentence. 

When the word “two” is adjucted by the word “ten”, which is the way “twelve” is written in Arabic, the  is dropped from the end of the word .  This occurs whether the twelve is of something masculine , or feminine .  Again, the now last letter (since the  was dropped) can be either an alif, or a , depending on the grammatical placement of the word.  The previous two examples had  for the last letter, here is an example with alif as the last letter .

There is no difference in meaning between all of these, except the obvious difference between the plain number two  and twelve .  The other numbers do not have all these different forms in the Glorious Qur’an, which is probably a relief for most of you, although the number one has some variances similar to the word two.   

A note: You may have noticed that all these different versions of the word “two” start with a hamzah al-wasl.  In all these cases when we begin the word with a kasrah, if we are starting with that word for whatever reason.  If we are continuing our reading connecting the word  in any of its forms with the word preceding it, we do not use the hamzah al-wasl, and instead go directly from the last letter and vowel of the preceding word to the of the word , in any of its forms.