Mongolian Adjectives: Invariable, and Compared With a Case

One form, and nothing agrees with anything

A Mongolian adjective never changes. Not for number, not for gender, not for the case of the noun it describes. шинэ (new) is шинэ in front of one book and in front of a hundred, in front of a subject and in front of an object. The course states this as a flat rule: the adjective never agrees, and word order alone shows what it is doing.

For an English speaker this is not a hurdle, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than dressing it up as a difficulty. English adjectives do not agree either — new book, new books — so the two languages behave identically here, and nothing has to be unlearned. The work on this page is all in the two sections after the next one. What does need watching is the temptation to make the adjective plural when the noun is plural, which is a habit imported not from English but from the first foreign language most English speakers studied.

Some adjectives from the course, so that the examples below are not abstract: том (big), жижиг (small), өндөр (high, tall), урт (long), богино (short), шинэ (new), хуучин (old, of things), залуу (young), халуун (hot), хүйтэн (cold), сайн (good), муу (bad), сайхан (beautiful), хурдан (fast), хойрго (slow), хэцүү (difficult).

Position does all the work

Because the adjective carries no marking, its position is the only thing that says whether it is describing a noun or asserting something about it. Move it and the sentence changes category.

Of those pairs, өндөр уул and the sentence Энэ кино сайн are the course's own; the rest are assembled from its vocabulary by the rule it states, which is what the rule is for.

Two things to notice in the right-hand column. The adjective is identical to the one on the left — it has not been turned into a predicate by any ending. And there is no verb in the sentence at all: nothing corresponds to English is. The adjective sits in the position where a verb would sit, at the end, and that position is enough. Why Mongolian can do without the verb to be in a sentence like this is on the page on байна, and the general shape of a Mongolian sentence, modifier before modified and predicate last, is on the word order page.

The practical warning: because the adjective is unmarked and the copula is absent, a two-word sequence can be read two ways until you know which is the whole sentence. өндөр уул is a phrase; Уул өндөр is a statement. The only difference is which word came first.

There is no comparative ending

Here is the first real departure from English. English has two ways to compare — -er on short adjectives, more in front of long ones — and both of them touch the adjective. Mongolian touches the other noun instead. The thing you are comparing against goes into the ablative case, and the adjective stands bare at the end:

Парис Улаанбаатараас том.

Paris Ulaanbaatar-ABL big

"Paris is bigger than Ulaanbaatar."

Оюутан багшаас залуу.

student teacher-ABL young

"The student is younger than the teacher."

Word for word, that is Paris, from Ulaanbaatar, big. The ablative is the case that elsewhere means from, and the logic is the measuring logic: starting from Ulaanbaatar and going up, Paris is big. English than is not a word in this construction; it is an ending on a noun. So the question an English speaker should ask before translating a comparison is not what is the comparative of big? — there isn't one — but which noun takes the ending? The answer is always the standard of comparison, never the subject.

The four shapes of that ending, –аас, –оос, –ээс and –өөс, and everything else the ablative does, are on the ablative page. This page owns the system of degrees; that one owns the case.

The superlative: хамгийн, in front and unchanged

The superlative is a separate word placed in front of the adjective, and it does not change: хамгийн.

The example to hold on to is хамгийн ухаантай (the cleverest). The construction is open to any adjective in the language, so the highest and the best are built the same way, by putting хамгийн in front of өндөр and of сайн — assembled here by the rule rather than quoted from the course, which is all the construction needs.

Nothing happens to the adjective. There is no Mongolian equivalent of the English irregular superlatives — no best beside good, no worst beside bad — so the entire English list of irregular comparisons becomes two constructions and no vocabulary.

Adjective and adverb are not separate words

English mostly keeps the two apart with -ly: quick describes a thing, quickly describes an action. Mongolian very often uses the same word for both, unchanged, and leaves position to disambiguate. In front of a noun it is an adjective; in front of a verb it is an adverb.

Монгол хэлийг яаж хурдан сурах вэ?

Mongolian language-ACC how fast learn-PART Q

"How can one learn Mongolian quickly?"

Оюутан францаар сайн ярьдаг.

student French-INS good speak-HAB

"The student speaks French well."

In the first, хурдан is the word listed in the course as fast, and here it means quickly. In the second, сайн is listed as good, and here it means well. Neither carries any ending to mark the shift. So when you look up an adjective you have looked up the corresponding adverb in the same breath — and conversely, when a word that your dictionary calls an adjective turns up just before the verb, it is not a mistake and you should read it adverbially.

There is one other route to an adverb, through the instrumental case ending –аар and its harmonic partners, which turns some nouns into expressions of manner. It is mentioned here only so that you are not surprised by it; it belongs to the instrumental page.

For very, the course uses a word in front of the adjective rather than any ending: их, which on its own means great, much. You can see it doing the job in Европчуудад Монголын амьдралын өртөг их өндөр биш (for Europeans the cost of living in Mongolia is not very high), where их өндөр is very high. The word маш (very) is also given in the course's lists.

A large part of the vocabulary is built, not learned

Look down a list of Mongolian adjectives and the same two endings keep appearing. –тай, with its partners –той and –тэй, makes an adjective meaning having that; –гүй makes its exact negative, lacking that.

They are listed here only to mark the class, because the thing worth knowing on this page is that a built adjective behaves exactly like a basic one: it is invariable, it goes in front of its noun, and it can close a sentence. How the endings attach, which of the three vowels each takes and what they do to the word underneath are the business of the page on building new words.

Two boundaries to respect. The ending –тай is also the comitative case ending, the one that means with on an ordinary noun, and the relationship between the two uses lives on the comitative page. And one small fact about –гүй will save you hunting for a second form: it never changes shape. Where that puts it among the Mongolian suffixes is set out on the exceptions page.

Words in the adjective slot that are not adjectives

The position in front of a noun is open to more than adjectives, and this is where reading gets harder. A verb form can stand there and do the same job:

• шинэ ном (a new book) — an adjective;
• сонирхолтой ном (an interesting book) — an adjective built with –той;
• уншсан ном (a book that has been read) — a verb form;
• таны бичсэн ном (the book you wrote) — a verb form with its own subject in front of it;
• уншиж байгаа ном (a book being read) — two verb forms;
• ярьдаг хэл (the spoken language) — a verb form;
• уусан пиво (the beer that was drunk) — a verb form.

All seven are built the same way and none of them agrees with the noun. Those verb forms are participles, they are the hardest thing in the Mongolian verb for an English speaker, and they have their own page: Mongolian participles. What matters here is only the slot. If you learn to expect that anything standing in front of a noun is describing it, and that nothing in that position will be inflected to match, you can read таны бичсэн ном correctly before you know what –сан is.

What the course does not teach, and this page does not invent

Mongolian has ways of intensifying and of softening an adjective that the course does not set out as rules, and they are not reconstructed here. One trace of a softening ending is visible in the course's own word lists, and it is worth naming as an observation rather than a rule: alongside ойр (near) the lists also give ойрхон with the same gloss, and several adjectives carry the same –хан or –хон ending — дулаахан (pleasantly warm), сэрүүхэн (cool), хямдхан (cheap), хөөрхөн (pretty). The resemblance is real and the gentler shade of meaning is real. But the course presents these as separate vocabulary items, not as a suffix you may attach at will, and you should treat them the same way until you have seen the pattern described in a grammar.