All Seven Cases on One Page

There comes a point, usually in the third or fourth week, when you no longer need the cases explained. You need them listed. You are halfway through a sentence, you have met a word ending in –ээр, and you want to know in one second whether that is "from" or "by". That is what this page is for. Nothing on it is argued; the arguments are on the pages named at the end of each section.

Use it in two directions. Top to bottom, when you are writing and need the ending for a noun you have in mind. Bottom to top, with the reverse index, when you are reading and need to decode an ending you have just met. The second direction is the one that gets neglected, and it is the one that makes Mongolian texts readable.

Four nouns through the seven cases

These four stems are chosen because between them they cover most of what can happen. гэр (house, ger) ends in р and is front-class. хот (city) ends in т and is back-class with о. ном (book) ends in м and is also back-class with о, but behaves differently in the dative-locative. хүн (person) ends in н and is front-class with ү.

Three rows in that table repay a second look. The dative-locative row has four different shapes for four nouns: a bare –т, a linking vowel plus –д, a different linking vowel plus –д, and a bare –д. The genitive row shows хүний and not хүнийн, because words ending in н belong to the group that takes the shorter ending. And the comitative row has no form in ө anywhere, because that form does not exist in the language.

Stems that do not look like these four

Nouns ending in a long vowel, in и, or in an unstable н look alarming the first time. They are not irregular; they are the same seven endings with one letter of repair. Here are the forms the method itself gives, so you can see what the repair looks like.

• хөдөө (countryside): хөдөөний, хөдөөд, хөдөөнөөс, хөдөөгөөр. A long vowel takes н before the ablative and г before the instrumental.
• их сургууль (university): сургуулийн, сургуульд, их сургуулиас. The soft sign gives way to и before a vowel ending.
• такси (taxi): таксиний, таксигаар. A final и behaves like a long vowel before the instrumental.
• галт тэрэг (train): галт тэргээр. The short vowel of the last syllable drops, and only the second word is inflected.
• автобус (bus): автобусны, автобусаар. One of the words whose genitive is –ны.
• малчин (herder): малчинд, малчинтай, genitive малчны. The н stays in most cases and drops in the genitive.
• хүүхэд (child): хүүхдийн, хүүхэдтэй. Another dropped short vowel.
• мөнгө (money, silver): мөнгөөр. A short final vowel merges into the long vowel of the ending.

Why each of those changes happens, and how to predict it on a new word, is the business of the page on choosing a case ending and of the page on word structure.

From ending to case: the reverse index

This is the table to use while reading. You have a word; you can see its tail; you want the case.

The four pairs that get misread

Mongolian case endings are short, and four pairs of them differ by one letter. These four account for most misreadings by beginners, and they are worth drilling in isolation.

• –ийн against –ийг. Genitive against accusative. гэрийн is "of the house"; гэрийг is "the house" as the object of a verb. One is a modifier of the next noun, the other is an argument of the verb at the end of the sentence.
• –аас against –аар. Ablative against instrumental. гэрээс is "from the house"; гэрээр is "by, through the house". The final с and р are also easy to confuse by ear, not only by eye.
• –т against –тай. Dative-locative against comitative. гэрт is "in the house"; гэртэй is "with a house, having a house". Two syllables apart in meaning, two letters apart on the page.
• –д on a noun: case or plural? –д is the dative-locative ending, but the same letter also closes one of the plurals, and the method warns about the collision in so many words: иргэд means "citizens", not "to the citizen". A noun ending in н drops it before that plural — иргэн gives иргэд — and that missing letter is the only clue the word itself offers, so a final –д is never by itself proof of a case. The plural page gives the nouns that take it.

Endings that look like cases and are not

When you are decoding a word, half the work is ruling things out. These suffixes sit in the same place as a case ending — at the end of the word — and none of them is one.

• –гүй: the negative. It never changes its vowel, and it is the counterpart of –тай: "without" against "with". The negation page owns it.
• –ууд, –үүд, –чууд, –чүүд, –с and the separate word нар: the plural, which Mongolian marks far less often than English does.
• –аа, –оо, –ээ, –өө: the reflexive possessive, which comes after a case ending rather than instead of one. найзтайгаа is a comitative with the reflexive stacked on top of it.
• нь, минь, чинь: particles, written as separate words or leaning on the previous one, and dealt with on the page about particles.
• –сан, –даг, –на, –х: verb endings. If the word carries one of these, you are not looking at a noun at all — although a verb form can itself take a case ending afterwards, as in үзэхийг.

The forms you cannot work out

Everything in the tables above is derivable from the noun. The personal pronouns are not: their stems change under the ending, so nothing you can see at the front of the word tells you what the back of it will be. би gives намайг and надад; чи gives чамд; та gives таны. That is as far as this sheet goes, because a list of forms is not a reference until it is complete: the full paradigm at all seven cases, with the plurals and the question of манай against бидний, is on the pronouns page, and that is where to look a pronoun up.

What demands which case

Some words in Mongolian govern a case the way English interested governs in. There is no reasoning available; you learn the pairing with the word. This short list covers the ones you meet first.

The full list of postpositions with the case each one takes is on the postpositions page; what дуртай and хэрэгтэй actually mean, and how they work as constructions, belongs to the pages on the dative-locative and on expressing can, must and want.

A checklist before you write an ending

1. Decide the case from the meaning, not from the English preposition. "With" and "in" each cover two cases.
2. Find the controlling vowel of the word, skipping any и.
3. Look at the last letter. Consonant, and which one? Long vowel? Diphthong? Soft sign?
4. Check whether the word needs a repair: a linking consonant, a linking vowel, or a dropped short vowel.
5. If the word is part of a group, put the ending on the last word only.
6. If the word is a pronoun, stop and look it up.

Six steps sounds slow, and it is slow for about a fortnight. Then steps two to five collapse into a single glance, because they are properties of the word rather than decisions about the sentence, and you stop computing them for words you have already written a few times. What stays conscious for much longer is step one — and that is the right place for your attention to be, because a wrong vowel in an ending makes you sound foreign, while a wrong case makes you unintelligible.

Where to read the rule behind each line

• Which case to use, and the question each one answers: the overview page on the seven cases.
• Which form of the case to write: the decision tree page on choosing case endings.
• The vowel inside the ending, and the exceptions to it: the three vowel harmony pages.
• The linking letters and the dropped vowels: the page on word structure.
• Each case in detail, including the ones with more than one job: the seven case pages, and the page on руу and рүү for movement towards a place.