–цгаа: The Suffix That Says All of Us, Together

A verb that counts its subjects

One of the first comforts of Mongolian for an English speaker is that verbs do not change for person or number. Би явна, чи явна, бид явна — I go, you go, we go, and the verb is the same word every time. There is nothing to learn, and nothing to get wrong.

What you give up in exchange is that the verb tells you nothing. In English, "they are going" and "he is going" are distinguishable even if you miss the pronoun. In Mongolian, if the subject is dropped — and Mongolian drops subjects freely — явна on its own is silent about who is going and how many of them there are.

This is where –цгаа– comes in. It is a suffix that goes inside the verb and says: several people are doing this, and doing it together. It is not agreement — nothing forces it, and it does not match a plural subject the way an English verb matches one. It is a piece of extra information the speaker chooses to add, and it is one of the few genuinely number-marking things in the whole verb system. The general fact that verbs do not agree is in Mongolian Verbs: Stem, Suffix, and No Person Agreement; this page is about the exception.

The four shapes

The suffix harmonises in the usual four shapes, chosen by the vowels of the stem:

–цгаа– for stems in а and у, –цгоо– for stems in о, –цгээ– for stems in э, и and ү, –цгөө– for stems in ө.

Every one of them ends in a long vowel, and that long vowel is going to matter in a moment. The harmony rule that picks between them is the same rule that picks between every other set of four, and it is set out in Mongolian Vowel Harmony: The Rule.

It is not an ending

Here is the single most important structural fact, and it is easy to get wrong because every form you meet will look like a finished word.

–цгаа– does not close a verb. It is written with a hyphen on both sides for a reason. It occupies the slot between the stem and the ending, and something must follow it:

stem + –цгаа– + ending

So байцгаа– is not a word. Байцгаана is a word, and the method breaks it apart exactly like this:

• байцгаана
• бай– + –цгаа– + –на
• be + PL + PRES-FUT
• "(several of you) are"

That three-part shape is the whole grammar of this suffix. Once you can see it, every form becomes readable. The slot it sits in is shared with the causative, the passive and the cooperative, and the shape of the slot is described in Causative, Passive and Cooperative Verbs in Mongolian.

What can follow it

Almost anything. The method itself gives collective forms with six different endings on them, which is the best demonstration that this suffix constrains nothing:

Read the second row and the first row side by side and you can see what the suffix is contributing on its own. Ярьцгаадаг is the ordinary habitual –даг, which says "does this as a rule" — plus the information that the people doing it are several. English needs a pronoun and a plural verb to say as much: "they talk." Mongolian says it inside one word, and does not need the pronoun at all.

The last row is the odd one, and it is not really an exception. A bare verb stem can be used as a blunt order in Mongolian, and a bare collective stem is that same blunt order addressed to a group. The method's example is a teacher to a class: Номоо нээцгээ! "Open your books!" — said to everyone at once. The range of ways to give an order, and how rude each one is, belongs to Mongolian Imperatives: Six Degrees of Asking.

And the suffix survives a question particle without trouble: Хэдэн цагт явцгаах вэ? "What time shall we set off?" The particle вэ is a separate word standing after the participle, as it always is.

The vowel of the suffix governs what comes next

This is the piece of practical mechanics that makes collective forms easy to build, and it follows from the fact that every shape of the suffix ends in a long vowel.

When a suffix attaches to a word, its vowel is chosen by the vowels already in the word — and the nearest vowel is the one in the suffix just before it. So the ending that follows –цгаа– is picked on –цгаа–'s own vowel, which is sitting right there in front of you. You never have to look back at the stem:

• сур– plus –цгаа– plus the first-person ending gives сурцгаая — the ending is –я, matching the аа.
• оч– plus –цгоо– plus the first-person ending gives очицгооё — the ending is –ё, matching the оо.
• сонс– plus –цгоо– plus the present-future gives сонсоцгооно — the ending is –но, matching the оо.

Because the suffix agreed with the stem in the first place, this never conflicts with the stem's own class. What it gives you is a short cut: build the collective stem, look at its last vowel, and choose the ending from that. For a long word this saves you from counting vowels back to the beginning, which is exactly where beginners make mistakes.

"Let's": –цгаа– with the first-person ending

This is the use you will meet most, and the one worth being able to produce on demand.

Mongolian has a set of endings for a first-person proposal — the "let's" forms. On a plain stem they give Явъя "let's go" and Уулзъя "let's meet". How those endings are chosen, and how they sit among the other ways of proposing something, is the business of Mongolian Imperatives: Six Degrees of Asking.

Put the collective suffix in front of that ending and you get a "let's" that explicitly includes everybody:

• Явцгаая! "Let's go!" — all of us, together
• Сурцгаая! "Let's learn!"
• Очицгооё! "Let's go there!"
• Урьцгаая! "Let's invite him!"
• Хамтдаа тоолж сурцгаая! "Let's learn to count together!"

English cannot make this distinction. "Let's go" already contains "us", so there is nothing left to add, and the collective suffix has no English counterpart at all — it adds warmth and inclusion rather than information. The nearest English gets is a change of tone, or a tacked-on phrase: "let's all go", "come on, everyone". That is the right way to feel the suffix: it is the difference between a proposal and an invitation.

Notice in the last example that сурцгаая closes a sentence that already contains another verb, тоолж. The collective suffix changes nothing about how a sentence is put together: the last verb still carries everything, and the converb in front of it still does the linking. That pattern is in Mongolian Converbs: Linking Clauses Without "and", "if", "after".

Greeting a group

The very first Mongolian sentence most learners meet has a collective version, and it is worth having from the start:

• Сайн байна уу? — to one person
• Сайн байцгаана уу? — to several

The difference is four letters in the middle of the second word. English makes you choose between "how are you" and something awkward like "how are you all"; Mongolian has a proper form for it, and using it when you walk into a room full of people is both correct and noticed. The greeting itself, with its expected replies, is in Сайн байна уу: Greetings and How to Leave.

хамт and хамтдаа

The words for "together", хамт and хамтдаа, keep this suffix company constantly — as in Хамтдаа тоолж сурцгаая! above. The method notes the pairing, and it is worth knowing for two reasons.

First, when you are listening, хамтдаа early in the sentence is a good signal that a collective verb is coming at the end. Second, the pairing is not a redundancy to be avoided. English would hesitate to say both "together" and a collective marker, because it feels like saying the same thing twice. Mongolian does not mind in the least, and a learner who carefully deletes one of them in the name of economy will sound stiff.

When the stem needs a linking vowel

Compare these two sets of forms from the method:

• яв– gives явцгаая; сур– gives сурцгаая; бай– gives байцгаана
• сонс– gives сонсоцгооно; давт– gives давтацгаана; оч– gives очицгооё

In the second set an extra vowel has appeared between the stem and the suffix. Two of those stems, сонс– and давт–, end in two consonants, and a vowel is slipped in to keep three consonants from colliding — as in the music teacher's За одоо бүгдээрээ хөгжмийн хичээлээ дахин нэг давтацгаана шүү! "Right, now let us all go through our music lesson once more!" The third stem, оч–, brings its own и from the family of verbs whose dictionary form is –их.

The method gives these forms and does not state a rule for them, and this guide will not invent one. The honest advice is the advice the method itself gives about other suffixes with two shapes: learn the form you hear. The recordings are the authority here, not a pattern you deduce. What is reliable is the recognition rule — when you see цгаа, цгоо, цгээ or цгөө in the middle of a verb, you are looking at a collective, whatever vowel is sitting in front of it.

It is optional

Worth saying plainly, because English grammar trains the opposite instinct. A plural subject does not require this suffix. Бид явна is a perfectly good "we are going", with no collective marker anywhere in it. You add –цгаа– when you want to say that the action is a joint one, or to include your listeners in it, or to address a group — not because the subject happens to be more than one person.

Nor is it a plural ending in disguise. The suffixes that pluralise nouns are a different set with a different job, and they come with their own surprise, which is how rarely Mongolian bothers to use them: see The Mongolian Plural, and When Not to Mark It.

What it is not

• Not a converb. A converb hangs one clause onto another and cannot close a sentence. –цгаа– does no linking at all; it modifies a single verb and then takes an ending like any stem.
• Not a mood or a tense. It does not compete with –на, –даг or –сан. It sits in front of them.
• Not agreement. Nothing in the sentence obliges it, and a plural subject does not trigger it.
• Not a case ending. It never appears on a noun.