Mongolian Converbs: How One Verb Links to the Next

What a converb is

Take an English sentence with two actions in it: "I went home and did my homework." The two verbs are both finished, both first-person, both past. English says all of that twice — went carries past tense, did carries past tense again — and glues the halves together with and.

Mongolian does it once. The first verb is put into a special form that says nothing about tense, person or mood; the second verb says all of it, for both:

• Би гэртээ хариад хичээлээ хийсэн.
• I home-DAT-REFL return-CONV lesson-ACC-REFL do-PAST
• "I went home and did my homework."

The form хариад is a converb. It is a verb form whose job is to hang a clause onto another clause. It cannot end a sentence, it cannot be questioned, it cannot be negated, and it does not tell you when anything happened. It is the Mongolian equivalent not of a verb form in English but of a conjunction — and that is the single most useful thing to know about it.

This matters more than it may sound. An English speaker reading Mongolian for the first time looks for the words that join clauses, finds none, and concludes that the sentence is one long clause. It is not. The joins are there; they are suffixes, sitting at the end of the words you were treating as ordinary verbs.

The method calls these forms "gerunds", following French grammatical tradition; this guide calls them converbs throughout.

Only the last verb carries tense

In a Mongolian sentence with several verbs, exactly one of them is finite — and it is the last one. Everything the sentence says about time, mood, politeness, question and negation is said there, once. Nothing in English works this way.

The proof is a pair of sentences from the method that use the same converb and mean different things in time:

• Би хоолоо идээд, пиво уусан. "I ate my meal and then drank a beer."
• Би өглөө босоод шүршүүрт дандаа ордог. "I get up in the morning and always take a shower."

Both first verbs carry the same ending. идээд and босоод are the same form of the same kind. The first sentence is past because уусан is past; the second is a daily habit because ордог is habitual. The converb took no position at all, and borrowed one from the end of the sentence.

–ж and –ч: the plain link

This is the commonest converb and the loosest. It is added to the stem, and it never changes shape for vowel harmony — there is no four-way series here, just –ж or –ч:

• яв– gives явж; ярь– gives ярьж; ир– gives ирж; тоол– gives тоолж; унт– gives унтаж
• ав– gives авч; өг– gives өгч; амьдар– gives амьдарч

Which verb takes which? The method prints both forms and does not state a rule, and it says so plainly: learn each verb with the form you hear in the recordings. That is honest advice and this guide repeats it rather than inventing a rule. The meaning does not change: –ж and –ч are two shapes of one suffix.

What it does is link two actions tightly — as one event, or as manner, or as purpose, with no claim that the first finished before the second started:

• Би тоолж сурмаар байна. "I want to learn to count."
• Би монголоор ярьж сурмаар байна. "I want to learn to speak Mongolian."
• Бид кино үзэж ирсэн. "We came to see a film."
• Тэр морь унаж сурмаар байна. "He wants to learn to ride a horse."

Notice what English does with these. "Learn to count", "learn to speak", "came to see" — English reaches for to and an infinitive. Mongolian has no infinitive to put after a verb, so the first verb takes –ж and the second one does the grammar. The same suffix that means "and" in one sentence means "to" in another; the suffix is not translating a word, it is marking a join.

One familiar form is built on exactly this converb: the progressive –ж байна is this suffix plus the verb байна, which supplies the tense. The progressive and the habitual belong to the page on the present and future, Present and Future: –на, –ж байна and –даг; what belongs here is only the fact that the –ж in it is this converb and nothing else.

–аад: finish this, then that

The second converb to learn is the one that orders two actions. It says that the first action is complete before the second begins. It has four harmonic forms; the shapes themselves are set out once in the guide, in The Four-Form Suffix Table, and this page only uses them:

• яв– gives яваад; гар– gives гараад; ав– gives аваад
• бос– gives босоод; оч– gives очоод; ор– gives ороод; хон– gives хоноод
• ир– gives ирээд; ид– gives идээд; үз– gives үзээд; хүр– gives хүрээд
• өг– gives өгөөд

Two of those need a word of warning, and the warning is not about harmony. суу– gives суугаад, with a г that has appeared out of nowhere, and харь– gives хариад, where the soft sign has turned into a vowel. Those are the spelling adjustments that happen whenever a suffix meets a long vowel or an unstable final consonant, and they are not a fact about converbs — they belong to How a Mongolian Word Is Built: Stem Plus Suffixes.

Now look at what English does with this one suffix:

• Бид ууланд гараад гэртээ харьсан. "We went up into the mountains and then went home."
• Кристин энд нэг сар суугаад Францад буцна. "Christine will stay here a month and after that go back to France."
• Та хөдөө яваад юу үзсэн бэ? "What did you see when you went to the countryside?"
• Тэр Улаанбаатарт ирээд олон хүнтэй уулзсан. "On arriving in Ulaanbaatar, he met a lot of people."
• Чамаас захиа аваад би их баярласан. "I was very happy when I got your letter."
• Бид Эрдэнэ-Зуу хийдийг үзээд Орхоны хөндийд хоноглоно. "We will sleep in the Orkhon valley after visiting Erdene Zuu monastery."

Six sentences, one Mongolian suffix, and in English: "and then", "after that", "when", "on arriving", "after". The English conjunction you choose is a matter of English style. The Mongolian is making one claim only — that this action was over before the next one started — and leaves the rest to be obvious.

This is why trying to memorise a converb as "equals after" fails within a page. Memorise the relation instead: –аад is sequence.

Choosing between –ж and –аад

These two cover most of what you will want to say, and English gives you no help in choosing, because English says "and" for both. The test is whether the first action is over.

In the first, coming and seeing are one trip. In the second, the meal is over before the beer is opened. Swap the suffixes and you have changed the meaning, not the grammar.

–саар and –тал

Two more converbs appear in the method's table of verb forms, and you will meet them in reading before you need to produce them.

–саар marks an action that began and is still going on. Followed by байна, which carries the tense in the usual way, it is the nearest Mongolian comes to the English "has been doing": Бороо орсоор байна. "It has been raining." In a sentence with a second verb it sets the frame inside which the other action happens: Тэд ууланд явсаар цангаж, өлсөн. "While they were going up into the mountains they got thirsty and hungry." The method treats this form alongside the instrumental case, and the –саар байна pattern is set out in The Mongolian Instrumental: By, With, and In a Language.

–тал means until: the action of the main clause runs up to the point the converb names. The form you are likeliest to hear first is a leave-taking: За тэгье, орой болтол баяртай! "Right then — goodbye until this evening!" Болтол is бол– (to become) with the о shape of the suffix, so the phrase says literally "goodbye until it becomes evening".

The method's table also lists –хлаар without naming it and without stating a rule for it, but its answer keys use it with the sense "when": Таныг хурдан ярихлаар, би ойлгож чадахгүй байна. "When you speak fast, I cannot understand." Recognise it; the method gives no more than that, and neither does this page.

And –вал with its three harmonic partners is the converb for if. It has a page of its own in this guide, The Mongolian Conditional: –бал, –вэл and "if", because the choice between the в– and б– shapes and the behaviour of хэрвээ need room. All that belongs here is the fact that "if" is a converb too: the condition is marked on the first verb, exactly as a sequence is.

Finding where the clause ends

Here is the skill that converbs actually demand, and it is a reading skill. Mongolian will hand you a long string of words with no conjunction and often no comma. Work from the right.

Одоо таксины буудал руу очиж тэндээс такси аваад байгалийн түүхийн музей руу явна.

Find the verbs. There are three: очиж, аваад, явна. Only the last one is finite — явна, present-future. So the sentence has one tense, one subject, and three clauses:

1. Одоо таксины буудал руу очиж — "now going to the taxi rank" (loose link: –ж)
2. тэндээс такси аваад — "taking a taxi from there" (and that is finished before the next: –аад)
3. байгалийн түүхийн музей руу явна — "we will go to the natural history museum" (finite)

Each clause ends at its verb. That is the whole rule: a clause closes where a verb form appears, and the clause boundaries of a Mongolian sentence are simply the positions of its verbs. Once you can see that, a twenty-word sentence stops being frightening, because you are reading three short ones.

Try it on Бид Хархорин хүрээд дараа нь Эрдэнэ Зууд очно. Two verbs: хүрээд (converb) and очно (finite, present-future). Two clauses. The дараа нь in the middle is "after that" — Mongolian is free to add that signal as well as the suffix, exactly as English says "and then" when "and" would do.

The patterns in which a second verb supplies a meaning English would put in a modal — болох, чадах, –маар байна, all of them sitting on a converb — belong to Sentences With Two Verbs: How Mongolian Chains Actions and Can, Must, Want, Like: Mongolian Without Modal Verbs.

When the two clauses have different subjects

Most of the time a converb clause shares its subject with the main clause, which is why Mongolian can afford to say the subject once. When the subjects differ, the subject of the subordinate clause takes the accusative marking, as in the method's own Багшийг үүдээр орж ирэхэд сурагчид огт яриагүй байсан. "When the teacher came in through the door, the students were not talking at all." That accusative on a whole clause is a separate mechanism with its own page, Complex Sentences in Mongolian: гэж and Nominalised Clauses; it is mentioned here only so that the shape does not take you by surprise.

Three things that look like converbs and are not

• –ийг is not a converb. It is the accusative case, and when you see it on something verb-shaped it means a whole clause has been turned into a noun and made the object. See Complex Sentences in Mongolian: гэж and Nominalised Clauses.
• –цгаа– is not a converb. It is a derivational suffix marking that several people are doing the action, and it still needs a mood ending after it: явцгаая is stem plus –цгаа– plus an ending. See –цгаа: The Suffix That Says "all of us, together".
• –сан is not a converb either. It is a participle, and a participle can close a sentence; a converb never can. The five participles have their own page, Mongolian Participles: The Relative Clause Before the Noun.

Beyond the method

Two further converbs are regular in the language and absent from the method, and are given here only so that you recognise them in reading. Neither is used in the exercises below. –магц means "as soon as". –нгүүт means much the same, with the sense "the moment that". Both are attested in reference grammars of Khalkha; neither appears in the course, and you should not build them by analogy onto verbs you have not met in them.