The Mongolian Genitive Case: Every Ending, One Position

One suffix where English has two constructions

English ties one noun to another in two ways. It can bend the first noun, as in the city's museum, or it can put a preposition in front of the second, as in the museum of the city. Mongolian does neither. It marks the first noun with a case ending and leaves the second one completely bare.

хотын музей

city-GEN museum

"the city museum"

The ending on хотын is the genitive. Nothing else in the phrase moves. музей stands in its dictionary form, exactly as it would if it were alone in the sentence.

Two consequences follow, and the second is the one that costs time. The first is that of is not a word in Mongolian at all; it is two or three letters glued to the end of a noun. The second is that the glued noun comes first. English reads outwards from the thing being described: museum, of, city. Mongolian reads inwards: city-of, museum. Every genitive phrase you meet has to be unwound from the right-hand end, and for a while you will read them in the wrong direction and get a museum that owns a city.

Every ending in the paradigm

The genitive has more written shapes than any other Mongolian case. That sounds worse than it is: most of the variation is spelling, driven by the last letter of the stem and by which set of vowels the stem belongs to. Only one group has to be learned word by word.

Read down the first column and you will see that the genitive distinguishes only two vowels, а-class against э-class, not the four that most Mongolian suffixes distinguish. There is no genitive ending in о and none in ө. хот has an о in it and still takes –ын; өнөөдөр has three ө and still takes –ийн. This is one of the places where the four-way harmony you learn early does not apply, and the page The Suffixes That Do Not Follow Vowel Harmony sets out why.

The group you have to memorise

The –ны and –ний words are the honest difficulty of this case. There is no reliable rule that tells you in advance that автобус takes –ны while улс, which also ends in с, takes –ын. Reference grammars describe these words as having a hidden or fleeting н that surfaces before an ending, which explains the shape but does not help you predict membership. The course treats them as vocabulary, and so should you: learn онгоцны буудал as a unit, the way you learned airport as a word rather than as air plus port.

Two of these words appear in more than one shape in the course itself. такси gives таксиний in the paradigm and таксины буудал (taxi rank) in a later lesson; хөдөө gives both хөдөөний and хөдөөгийн. Where the material wavers, both forms are in use and neither will be misunderstood. The exercises below stay with the form the paradigm gives.

The same applies to words that end in a vowel. Some take the hidden-н forms — сүү gives сүүний and хөдөө gives хөдөөний — while others do not. There is a procedure for working through the last letter of a word systematically across all seven cases, and it lives on the page Choosing the Right Case Ending: A Decision Tree. It is worth saying plainly that for the genitive, that procedure narrows the choice without closing it: a residue of memorisation stays.

When the last short vowel drops out

Several very common words lose their final short vowel the moment an ending is attached. The genitive of өнөөдөр (today) is not өнөөдөрийн but өнөөдрийн; намар (autumn) gives намрын; хүүхэд (child) gives хүүхдийн. Nothing about the genitive causes this. It is a general habit of Mongolian word-building that shows up before every case ending, and it is explained on the page How a Mongolian Word Is Built: Stem Plus Suffixes. Recognise the three forms above, because you will meet them constantly, and expect the same thing elsewhere.

Reading a genitive phrase

Once you accept that the ending comes first, a long list of ordinary expressions becomes transparent. Each of these is a noun in the genitive followed by a bare noun:

• онгоцны буудал (airport, literally the station of planes)
• хүнсний дэлгүүр (food shop)
• цайны газар (canteen, literally the place of tea)
• гарын хуруу (finger, literally the finger of the hand)
• ахын цамц (the brother's shirt)
• оройн хоол (the evening meal)
• намрын бороо (autumn rain)
• өнөөдрийн сонин (today's newspaper)
• монгол хэлний багш (teacher of Mongolian)
• монголын нутаг (the territory of Mongolia)

Notice how freely English redistributes the same relation. Sometimes it uses of, sometimes an apostrophe, sometimes a bare compound noun with no marker at all, and sometimes a single word. Mongolian uses one ending for all of them. When you are producing Mongolian rather than reading it, that is good news: you do not have to decide between the city's museum and the museum of the city, because there is only хотын музей.

Genitives inside genitives

Because the ending does not consume the noun it attaches to, genitives stack. Each one modifies everything to its right, so you read the phrase from the far end backwards.

миний сургуулийн нэр

my school-GEN name

"the name of my school"

The head of the phrase is нэр, and it carries nothing. сургуулийн tells you which name. миний tells you which school. Two more of the same shape: хүрээлэнгийн номын сан (the library of the institute, where номын сан is itself a genitive phrase meaning store of books) and манай улсын хүн ам (the population of our country). A chain of three is normal and a chain of four is readable; the only thing that tells you where it ends is the one noun with no ending.

Postpositions sit on a genitive

English puts about, after and before in front of a noun and asks nothing of it: about the book. Mongolian does the opposite twice over. The word goes behind the noun, and most of these words require the noun in front of them to be in the genitive. The genitive is not optional there, and leaving it off is one of the most audible beginner errors.

• номын тухай (about the book)
• хичээлийн өмнө (before the lesson)
• жилийн дараа (after a year)
• таван жилийн турш (for five years)
• хүүхдийн төлөө (for the child)
• их дэлгүүрийн хойно (behind the department store)
• миний гэрийн дэргэд (next to my home)

Not every postposition behaves this way — a few take the ablative, one or two take nothing — and the full list with the case each one demands is on the page Mongolian Postpositions and the Case Each One Takes. What matters here is the reflex: when you see one of these words, look left and expect a genitive.

Mongolian patronymics

Mongolians do not carry an inherited family name in the European sense. What stands in front of a person's own name is the father's given name, in the genitive. A woman called Дэлгэрмаа whose father is Бат gives her name as Батын Дэлгэрмаа — Bat's Delgermaa. Бат ends in a consonant after a back vowel, so it takes –ын like any other such noun; the patronymic is not a separate ending but the ordinary genitive doing an ordinary job.

Two practical points. The genitive element is not the name you call someone by, so a person introduced as Батын Дэлгэрмаа is addressed as Дэлгэрмаа. And because the first element changes with the father, siblings share it while cousins may not — which is why alphabetical lists in Mongolia are ordered by the given name. How to address people, and the respectful particle that goes with a name, belong to the page Mongolian Names, and How to Address Someone.

Asking whose and of what

Question words take the genitive like any other noun, and the two you need early are irregular enough to learn as forms.

Энэ хэний ээж вэ?

this who-GEN mother Q

"Whose mother is this?"

хэн (who) ends in н after a front vowel, so it gives хэний. юу (what) joins the memorised group and gives юуны, as in Та нар юуны мах авсан бэ? — what kind of meat did you buy, literally the meat of what. The question word stands in exactly the position the answer would occupy, in front of the noun it modifies. Why these questions end in вэ and бэ rather than уу is the business of the page Mongolian Question Particles.

Three things that look like genitives and are not

миний, чиний, таны and түүний really are the genitives of the pronouns, but they are formed irregularly and the choice between таны and танай, or between манай and бидний, is a separate problem. The forms and that choice are set out on the page Mongolian Personal Pronouns and Possessives.

гурван in front of a noun is not a genitive, although some descriptions call it one. It is the attributive form of the number three, used before a noun; it is neither –ын nor –ийн and it does not mean of three. See Mongolian Numbers and How They Behave Before a Noun.

номоо is not a genitive either, despite being about possession. It is the reflexive possessive, used when the owner is the subject of the sentence, and it sits in a different slot from the ending described here. The page The Reflexive Possessive explains the contrast with миний ном.

Beyond the method: stems that end in a long vowel

One gap has to be filled from outside, or the paradigm above cannot decline a whole class of ordinary nouns. Words whose stem ends in a long vowel and which do not belong to the hidden-н group insert г before the ending: хүү (boy, son) gives хүүгийн, and дүү (younger sibling) gives дүүгийн. This –гийн is standard and is described in reference grammars of Khalkha, but the method behind the course never teaches it and shows it only once in passing, in хөдөөгийн; it is deliberately kept out of the exercises below. Treat it as something to recognise rather than something to drill.