энэ, тэр, and the Series Built on Them

Four English words, two Mongolian ones

English has this, that, these and those: two distances multiplied by two numbers. Mongolian keeps the two distances and drops the numbers. энэ (this) points at what is near the speaker; тэр (that) points away. Neither has a separate plural form, so both of them also cover these and those, and nothing in the sentence has to agree with them.

That is a saving rather than a difficulty, and it is worth noticing why: Mongolian nouns usually do not mark number either, so a demonstrative with a plural form would have nothing to be plural with. The habit to put down is the English reflex of choosing between this and these before you have even decided what you are pointing at. In Mongolian that choice does not exist.

In front of a noun, and standing on its own

Both words do two jobs, exactly as their English counterparts do. They stand in front of a noun, and they stand alone as a subject.

Энэ юу вэ?

this what Q

"What is this?"

Энэ хэн бэ?

this who Q

"Who is this?"

In both of those, энэ is the whole subject and there is no verb at all. In the next one it is a modifier, sitting in front of the noun it points at:

Энэ нүүдэлчин Төв аймгаас ирсэн.

this nomad Töv province-ABL come-PAST

"This nomad comes from Töv province."

And тэр behaves the same way at the other end of the scale: Тэр эрэгтэй англиар сайн ярьдаг уу? (does that man speak English well?), where тэр singles out a man already in view rather than standing in for his name.

The demonstrative stays bare; the noun takes the ending

This is the one piece of mechanics on the page, and it is the piece that English speakers get wrong, because English has no endings to misplace. When a demonstrative and its noun are declined, the ending lands on the noun, once, at the end of the group. The demonstrative itself is left untouched.

• энэ хотод (in this city) — the dative-locative –д is on хот, not on энэ;
• энэ малчныг (this herder, as direct object) — the accusative is on малчин;
• тэр киног (that film, as direct object) — same again.

So a demonstrative plus a noun is one unit for the purposes of case, in exactly the way that галт тэрэг or эцэг эх are one unit. Which ending the noun actually takes is decided on the page on choosing a case ending, and why only the last word in a group carries it is set out on the page on how a word is built. Here the point is only that you never need to decline энэ in order to say in this city.

энд and тэнд: the same split applied to place

The two distances reappear in the words for place, and here the family resemblance is visible in the spelling: э– for near, т– for far.

Two things are worth stopping on. First, эндээс and тэндээс are not extra vocabulary: they are энд and тэнд with the ablative ending on them, so the place words decline like nouns. Second, English used to have a three-way set here — here, hither, hence — and lost two thirds of it, which is why a modern English speaker has to say from here and over there with two words and will not think to look for a single one. Mongolian keeps the distinction alive and expects you to make it: the difference between being somewhere, going somewhere and coming from somewhere is carried by the word itself. Where that three-way split is handled for ordinary nouns rather than for place words, it is on the page on saying "to" a place.

You will also meet the two of them joined, энд тэнд (here and there), which is one of those phrases that works the same way in both languages and needs no explanation.

A sentence with both halves of the series in it, from the method:

Тэгвэл тэнд уулзъя!

that-do-if there meet-IMP

"Then let's meet there!"

тийм: pointing at a kind rather than a thing

тийм is the member of the family that points at a quality — such, that sort of, like that. It behaves like an adjective and goes in front of the noun, and it answers the question ямар (what kind of), which is handled with the other question words on the question-words page.

There is a complication, and it is a frequency complication rather than a grammatical one. In the course, тийм turns up overwhelmingly as the answer yes, and in the set phrase Тийм үү? (Oh really?). Both of those are conversational moves rather than demonstrative uses, and they are treated with the question particles on their own page and under answering yes and no. What belongs here is only the structural fact: the word that means yes is the same word that means that kind, because saying yes in Mongolian is literally saying like that. What Тийм үү? is built from, and when a Mongolian speaker reaches for it, are set out on those two pages and not here.

A demonstrative you can conjugate

Here is where the series stops resembling anything in English. The stem тэг– means something like to do that way — and it is a verb stem, so every verb suffix in the language is available to it. English has no verb for this. It patches the gap with do so, do that, or more often with a conjunction, and an English speaker therefore goes looking for Mongolian conjunctions that do not exist.

Four forms earn their keep immediately:

• тэгэх үү — tacked onto a suggestion, it asks the other person to agree: shall we?, all right? It is often shortened to тэх үү in speech.
• За тэгье — the answer to that: all right then, let's do that.
• тэгээд — and then, after that. It opens the second of two sentences.
• тэгвэл — in that case, then. It draws a consequence.

Read them again and the suffixes should look familiar. тэгээд is тэг– with the perfective ending that means having done X, so and then is literally that having been done. тэгвэл is тэг– with the conditional ending, so in that case is literally if it is like that. Neither is a conjunction. Both are the same verb wearing two different endings, which are described on the converbs page and the conditional page. За тэгье carries the first-person ending from the imperatives page.

Two examples from the course show the two sentence-level forms at work:

Бид онгоцоор Бээжинд ирсэн. Тэгээд галт тэргээр Улаанбаатар луу явсан.

we plane-INS Beijing-DAT come-PAST. that-do-CONV train-INS Ulaanbaatar towards go-PAST

"We came to Beijing by plane. Then we went on to Ulaanbaatar by train."

Хоёулаа цуг тоглоё тэгэх үү?

the-two-of-us together play-IMP that-do Q

"Shall the two of us play together?"

And a longer one, where the suggestion runs to nine words before the agreement-seeking tag arrives at the very end: Бүгдээрээ энэ малчныг өнөө орой тоглолтонд урьцгаая тэгэх үү? (Shall we all invite this herder to tonight's concert?). Notice that the tag sits after the finished sentence, in the position English fills with shall we or right?, and that nothing earlier in the sentence changes to accommodate it.

The practical consequence for a reader is worth stating plainly. When a Mongolian sentence begins with Тэгээд or Тэгвэл, you are not looking at a linking word to be skipped over. You are looking at a verb that refers back to everything in the previous sentence. Translate it as that being done or if that is so the first few times, and the logic of the paragraph will come out right.

Beyond the method

Four forms belong in a reference dictionary rather than in the course, and they are given here only so that you recognise them in a text and do not read them as misprints. None of them is developed below and none of them is examined.

эдгээр (these) and тэдгээр (those) are listed in reference dictionaries as demonstratives in their own right, the second with examples of the type тэдгээр номууд (those books). They are not what the course teaches, and the course is not wrong to leave them out: as the first section said, Mongolian normally does not mark the demonstrative for number at all.

The э– side of the series is also fuller in the dictionaries than in the course. ийм (this kind of) is the near counterpart of тийм, and the verb ингэх (to do it this way) is the near counterpart of тэгэх — a dictionary defines it, in Mongolian, as to act thus, to make it like this. The course works entirely with the т– side, which is the side you will actually hear in the recordings, so that is where the four forms taught above come from.

What this page does not cover

Because Mongolian has no word for the, энэ and тэр end up doing some of the work English gives to the definite article, and that is a problem of its own with its own page: see Mongolian has no "a" and no "the". Reaching for энэ every time you would have said the is a beginner's mistake with a specific cure, and it is explained there rather than here.