The Mongolian Nominative

ном is the nominative of ном. There is no ending to learn, no vowel to harmonise, no linking letter. Of the seven cases this is the only one you can never get wrong in writing, and it is also the only one you can misread in every sentence you open, because a Mongolian noun with nothing on it is not automatically a subject.

That is the whole content of this page: what the bare form does, and how to tell it apart from the other bare form you will meet constantly.

Why "no ending" is not "no case"

English speakers sometimes conclude that a bare Mongolian noun is outside the grammar — raw vocabulary waiting to be put to use. It is not. The nominative is a position in a system of seven, and it carries information precisely because the other six are available and were not chosen. When a Mongolian speaker says ном rather than номыг or номын, that silence is a choice, and the listener reads it.

English works the same way and we never notice. In the dog bit the man, nothing is added to either noun; their roles come from their positions. English speakers have no trouble with a zero marker in their own language. The difficulty in Mongolian is only that the zero marker sits in a system where the other markers are suffixes, so the eye goes looking for a suffix and finds nothing, and concludes too fast.

The form a dictionary gives you

The nominative is the citation form. Every dictionary entry, every vocabulary list and every word you learn from the audio is given in the nominative: ном (book), гэр (house, ger), хүн (person), хот (city), багш (teacher), найз (friend). This matters more in Mongolian than in a language with a thinner case system, because it means a word you hear in the wild will usually not be in the form you learned it in. Hearing хөдөөнөөс and knowing you have learned хөдөө is a skill, and it is the reverse of the skill this page is about.

The subject

The nominative is the case of the subject, and the subject of a Mongolian sentence is almost always a bare noun or pronoun near the beginning.

• Миний найз өндөр.
• my friend-NOM tall
• "My friend is tall."

Note the two bare-looking words there. найз is the subject, in the nominative. Миний is not bare at all — it is the genitive of би, and it is doing the work of English my. The subject of that sentence is not "I" but "my friend", and the test is that the genitive leans on the word after it while the nominative stands on its own.

• Багш оюутанд ном өгсөн.
• teacher-NOM student-DAT book give-PAST
• "The teacher gave the student a book."

Here Багш is the subject in the nominative, оюутанд carries the dative-locative, and ном — which is also bare — is not a second subject. It is the direct object, with its ending left off. Holding those two bare words apart is the main business of this page, and it starts further down.

One thing the subject never does in Mongolian is agree with its verb. өгсөн is the same whether the giver is one teacher or four, whether it is I, you or they. There is no person marking, no number marking, no third-person s. The subject tells you who acted and the verb tells you what happened, and the two do not have to match.

Both halves of a sentence with no verb

Mongolian frequently makes a complete sentence out of two nouns and nothing else.

• Би багш.
• I-NOM teacher-NOM
• "I am a teacher."

Both words are in the nominative. The second one, багш, is the predicate: it says what the subject is. English cannot do this and has to insert am, which is why the construction feels unfinished to an English ear and why beginners keep trying to add something. There is nothing to add, and nothing missing. The same pattern runs through Би эмч. "I am a doctor", Би үйлчлэгч. "I am a waiter", Би нүүдэлчин. "I am a nomad", Энэ миний найз. "This is my friend", Тэр миний багш. "That is my teacher", Энэ кино сайн. "This film is good."

For the purposes of this page the point is narrow: a predicate noun is in the nominative, exactly like the subject, so a verbless sentence can have two nominatives in it and you identify them by position. The question of when Mongolian keeps байна and when it drops it belongs to the page on байна, "to be" and having no verb for "to have".

Proper names

Names behave like any other noun: the bare form is the nominative and takes the case endings when it needs them.

• Бат надтай хамт ажилладаг.
• Bat-NOM me-COM together work-HAB
• "Bat works with me."

Three details are worth having. First, a Mongolian full name is made of two words, and the first of them — the father's given name — stands in the genitive while the person's own name stays in the nominative: Батын Дэлгэрмаа, Delgermaa whose father is Bat. Second, the respectful гуай follows the name instead of preceding it, and the name itself stays bare: Та Баатар гуай биз? "You are Mr Baatar, I take it?" Third, a place name in a group behaves like any other group — only the last word is inflected, so in Мөрөн хотод ("in the city of Mörön") it is хот that carries the ending while Мөрөн stays in the nominative.

One sentence from the very first lessons shows a name sitting in the nominative where English would expect something else:

• Миний нэрийг Сарангэрэл гэдэг.
• my name-ACC Sarangerel-NOM call-HAB
• "My name is Sarangerel."

The name is bare; the word for "name" is the one carrying the accusative. Literally, "they call my name Sarangerel".

The real difficulty: a nominative, or an object that lost its ending

Here is the pair that an English speaker has to be able to sort, because it recurs in almost every sentence.

• Би энэ номыг уншсан.
• I-NOM this book-ACC read-PAST
• "I read this book."

• Би ном уншсан.
• I-NOM book read-PAST
• "I read a book."

In the second sentence ном has no ending at all, and it is still the direct object. The accusative marker is written only when the object is a definite one; with an indefinite object it is simply not there. Why Mongolian does that, and what the marker is carrying when it does appear, is the subject of the page on the accusative and of the page on having no word for "the". What concerns you here is the consequence: two bare nouns in one sentence, one of them a nominative subject and one of them an unmarked object, and no ending to tell them apart.

Four tests, in the order of usefulness.

Position

The Mongolian predicate closes the sentence. So the bare noun at or near the front is the subject, and a bare noun sitting immediately before the verb is almost certainly the object. In Би ном уншсан, Би is first and ном is pressed up against the verb. That alone settles it nine times out of ten. The page on word order gives the full three-block scheme and the one literary order that bends it.

A determiner in front of the noun

If энэ, тэр, миний, танай or any other pointing word stands in front of the noun, the object will normally be marked: энэ номыг, not энэ ном, as a direct object. So a determiner plus a bare noun, in object position, is unusual — and a determiner plus a marked noun is a reliable sign that you are looking at an object rather than a subject.

What kind of thing it is

Definite things and people get marked. Би нэг номыг дэлгүүрээс авсан. "I bought a book at the shop" carries the accusative on ном even though нэг means "one", because the speaker has a particular book in mind. A completely generic object — a book, any book, books in general — stays bare.

The verb

Ask what the verb needs. уншсан ("read") needs something read; if there are two bare nouns and one of them is the kind of thing you can read, that is your object. Some verbs need no object at all, and then a single bare noun is the subject by elimination.

Where English puts a subject and Mongolian does not

Three common constructions put the person in a case other than the nominative, and an English speaker reaches for a nominative every time. They are here only so that you can see which word is bare; the case each one demands is set out on the dative-locative page, and what the constructions actually mean is on the page about can, must, want and like.

• Надад толь бичиг хэрэгтэй. "I need a dictionary." The person who needs is in the dative-locative, Надад, not the nominative; the thing needed, толь бичиг, is the bare form. English puts "I" in the subject slot and Mongolian does not.
• Би Монгол улсад дуртай. "I like Mongolia." Here the person is nominative, Би, but the thing liked takes the dative-locative. The pattern is the mirror image of the one above, which is exactly why the two get confused.
• Би ажилтай. "I have work." The possessor is nominative and the thing possessed takes the comitative. Likewise Би таван морьтой. "I have five horses", and Энэ оюутан олон номтой. "This student has a lot of books" — the subject is still the bare noun group at the front. Why Mongolian expresses having this way, and what it uses in place of a verb for "have", is the subject of the page on байна and having no verb for "to have".

The rule to carry away is not a list of constructions but a habit: do not decide what the subject is from the English sentence you started with. Decide it from which Mongolian word is bare and standing at the front.

Two last bare forms

A noun after a numeral stays in the nominative and stays singular: таван морь, five horses, with no plural ending anywhere — the pages on numbers and on the plural say why the ending is missing. And a noun group of two or three words takes its case on the last word only, so the earlier words of the group are in no case at all and look like nominatives: Цаг агаар салхитай. "The weather is windy", where Цаг агаар is a single two-word subject; the page on word structure is the one that treats a group as a single block. Neither of those is a nominative doing something unusual; both are reminders that the absence of an ending in Mongolian is cheap, frequent, and therefore worth reading carefully rather than ignoring.