Asking a Question: уу, үү, бэ and вэ

Nothing moves

Start with a statement: Тэр багш. (She is a teacher.) To turn it into a question, add one word:

Тэр багш уу?

she teacher Q

"Is she a teacher?"

That is the whole operation. The subject stays in front, the predicate stays at the end, and nothing is inverted. Compare what English has to do to the same four words. She is a teacher becomes is she a teacher, with the verb jumping over the subject; and with almost any other verb English has to import a verb it does not need — she teaches becomes does she teach. Mongolian does none of this. There is no inversion and no equivalent of do, because the question is carried by a separate word at the very end.

The course points out that other languages in the region work the same way: Mandarin adds ma at the end, Japanese adds ka. If you have met either, the mechanism will feel familiar. If you have not, the thing to unlearn is the English reflex of reaching for the front of the sentence. In Mongolian the question is announced last, which has a consequence for listening: you do not know a sentence was a question until it is over.

The particle is written as a separate word, after a space. It is not a suffix, although in speech it leans so heavily on the word in front of it that beginners often cannot hear a break — which is a separate problem of its own.

Two kinds of question, two different rules

This is the point of the page, and it is worth stating before the detail, because almost every beginner's mistake here comes from applying one rule where the other belongs.

• A closed question — one you answer with yes or no — ends in уу, үү, юу or юү, and the choice is made by the vowels of the word in front.
• An open question — one containing a question word such as хэн (who) — ends in бэ or вэ, and the choice is made by the last consonant of the word in front.

So the same question, asked in two ways, can take particles chosen on entirely different grounds. Та Францаас ирсэн үү? (Are you from France?) has үү because ирсэн has an э in it. Та хаанаас ирсэн бэ? (Where are you from?) has бэ because ирсэн ends in н. Same verb, same speaker, two systems.

Closed questions: уу, үү, юу, юү

Four forms, and two questions to ask yourself about the word that will touch the particle. First, which vowel class does it belong to — а, о, у or э, ө, ү? Second, how does it end — in a consonant or a barely-pronounced final vowel, or in a long doubled vowel?

The ю– forms are not a different particle. They are the same particle with a glide in front of it, inserted because харандаа уу would be three vowels in a row with nothing to separate them. English does the same thing without noticing, in a against an.

The phrase everybody learns first, Сайн байна уу?, is decided by байна: it has an а, and its final а is one of those written vowels that is hardly sounded, so it does not count as a long vowel. Hence уу and not юу. Here are the course's own examples, each with the reason:

Two refinements come out of that list. The first is that the particle looks at the last word, not at the subject. In Таны багш эмэгтэй юү? (Is your teacher a woman?) the subject багш would have called for уу, but it is эмэгтэй that touches the particle, and эмэгтэй decides.

The second is that эмэгтэй ends in й, and yet the course writes юү, the long-vowel form. The same happens after the comitative –тай or –тэй: «Улаанбаатар» зочид буудал ресторантай юу? (Does the Ulaanbaatar hotel have a restaurant?), Энэ суудал хүнтэй юү? (Is this seat taken?). So for this particle a final diphthong counts as a long vowel. The course never states that as a rule; it is what all its examples do.

Open questions: бэ and вэ

As soon as the clause that the particle closes contains a question word — хэн (who), юу (what), хэзээ (when), хаана (where), яагаад (why), ямар (which), яаж (how) — the уу family is out, and the particle is бэ or вэ. The rule is short:

• бэ after a word ending in в, л, м or н;
• вэ after anything else.

Nothing about the vowels enters into it, and the particle itself is always written with э, after a word full of аs as readily as after a word full of өs. That makes these two particles one of the standing exceptions to vowel harmony, which is why they are listed among the suffixes that do not follow it.

In practice the last word of a Mongolian question is nearly always a verb, and that reduces the rule to two habits worth building deliberately. A past verb in –сан or –сэн ends in н, so it takes бэ: ирсэн бэ, төрсөн бэ, идсэн бэ. A verb in –х ends in х, and байна ends in a vowel, so both take вэ: явах вэ, байна вэ. Those two patterns will carry you through most of the questions you will ever ask.

Be careful not to let the question word itself decide. The same question word pulls either particle, depending on what ends the sentence: Чиний гэр хаана байна вэ? (Where is your ger?) against Та хаана төрсөн бэ? (Where were you born?). Both are built on хаана; the particle is settled by байна in one and by төрсөн in the other.

When the particle is simply not there

The course notes, and does not tidy away, that some questions have no final particle at all. All its examples of this end in байна:

• Сонин сайхан юу байна? (What's new?)
• Тэд одоо юу хийж байна? (What are they doing now?)
• Одоо хэдэн цаг болж байна? (What time is it now?)

And yet Ямар ном уншиж байна вэ? keeps its вэ. Both versions are in the material, which tells you something true about the language rather than something careless about the book. The practical advice is asymmetric: when you speak, apply the rule, because a particle is never wrong; when you listen, be ready for questions that end without one, and let the question word tell you that a question is what you just heard.

The юу trap

One word does double duty, and it catches everyone. юу is a question particle, as in Энэ харандаа юу? (Is this a pencil?). It is also the ordinary word for what. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Three tests separate them. Position: the particle is the last word of the sentence, while юу meaning what sits inside the sentence, in the slot where the answer would go. The expected answer: a particle demands yes or no, whereas юу meaning what demands a piece of information — Сонин сайхан юу байна? is answered Тайван байна. (All quiet.), not with yes. And the company it keeps: юу meaning what is a question word, so the sentence it is in cannot end in уу — it ends in бэ, вэ, or nothing.

The cleanest illustration has both at once, or nearly: Энэ юу вэ? (What is this?). Here юу is the question word and вэ is the particle, and the sentence has no verb at all.

Two expressions that behave differently

Тийм үү? is, word for word, yes plus a question particle, and it is used on its own, as a reaction to what the other person has just said: really? is that so? It expresses surprise or mild doubt, and it is not a request for information. In the course it answers a piece of news: Энэ хүүхэд Оюун руу чулуу шидсэн. – Тийм үү? (That child threw a stone at Oyun. – Really?). You will hear it several times in any real conversation, and using it is the cheapest way to show you are following.

биз дээ does something else again. Added to the end of a finished sentence, it says that the speaker already expects the answer to be yes and is asking for confirmation — the job English gives to isn't it, didn't you, right?, with a different tag for every verb. Mongolian has one tag for all of them:

Notice two things. The form never changes: биз дээ after сайн, after тохилог, after явна, after уулзсан. Where уу and үү make you check the vowels every time, this one is free. And the last line shows that биз is used alone, with the same meaning.

Set the three side by side, because they correspond to three different states of mind. уу and its family: you do not know, and you are asking. биз дээ: you think you know, and you want it confirmed. Тийм үү?: you have just been told, and you are reacting.

Answering

A closed question is answered тийм (yes) or үгүй (no) — but far more often by giving back the verb of the question in another form, which is why answering has a page of its own. An open question cannot be answered either way: the бэ or вэ at its end is the signal that something is wanted of you.

What this page does not cover

The question words themselves — хэн and its case forms, юу, хаана, хэзээ, хэдэн, ямар, яагаад, яаж — are on the page on question words; this page only says which particle they force. The negative question and what it means are on the negation page. тийм as a pointing word rather than as yes belongs with the demonstratives. And the other final particles — нь, шүү, аа, даа — are gathered on the page on final particles.