Who, What, Where, When: the Question Words

Who is your name?

Here is the sentence, and it is worth meeting head-on rather than discovering it in conversation:

Таны нэр хэн бэ?

your-GEN name who Q

"What is your name?"

Word for word it says who is your name. English uses what here, and so does almost every European language, so the first reaction is to assume that хэн must have a second meaning. It does not. хэн means who, only and always, and the course offers a reason for the choice: the name is taken to stand for the person. If the name is the person, then asking about the name is asking about a who.

There is corroboration in the vocabulary. To say that somebody is well known, Mongolian says they are with name:

Тэр хүн нэртэй.

that person name-COM

"That person is famous."

That is нэр (name) with the comitative ending, the same ending that elsewhere means with. Having a name is already being somebody. Hold on to that when a herder asks for yours.

The answer needs no verb: Миний нэр Оюун. (My name is Oyun.). Change the possessive to ask about someone else — Чиний нэр хэн бэ? (What is your name?), Түүний нэр хэн бэ? (What is his name?) — and learn one more reflex, the two-word way of handing a question back: харин та? (and you?). The forms of the possessives are on the pronouns page; what Mongolian does with personal names is on the page on names.

One rule to take away from this page

A question whose question word stands in the main clause never ends in уу or үү. It ends in бэ or вэ. The reason is worth saying because it makes the rule stick: уу asks for a yes or a no, and a question word asks for a piece of information instead. The two demands are incompatible, so those two never meet inside the same clause. What happens when a question word sits in an inner clause and the main clause is a polite request is set out on the question particles page.

The clearest demonstration is a pair of questions built on the same verb:

• Та Францаас ирсэн үү? (Are you from France?) — yes or no, so үү.
• Та хаанаас ирсэн бэ? (Where are you from?) — information, so бэ.

Both halves of that rule have an edge to be aware of. The negative half — never уу — holds of the clause the question word belongs to: the exception is the polite request, where a question word can sit in an inner clause in –ыг or –ийг while the main clause keeps its үү, as in хэлж өгнө үү and хэлнэ үү. The positive half has an exception of its own: a few of the course's questions carry no particle at all, and two of them appear further down this page — Тэд одоо юу хийж байна? and Та нар архи хэнтэй уумаар байна?. Both end in байна and both stop there. When that happens it is the question word, not a particle, that tells you a question was asked; the question particles page sets out what is known about it.

And the two kinds often come one after the other in real speech: Тэр хэн бэ? Тэр чиний нөхөр үү? (Who is that? Is that your husband?). Which of бэ and вэ you need is decided by the last consonant of the word in front of the particle, and that is settled on the question particles page.

Question words decline

This is the structural fact of the page, and it is where English and Mongolian part company. English has a tiny closed set of question words and expresses every further distinction with a preposition in front: who, to whom, from whom, with whom, by whom. Mongolian has one word and puts the ending on it. The course spells out six forms of хэн. Since хэн has an э, every ending that offers a choice of vowel turns up here in its э form.

Only хэний is worth learning as an item rather than deriving; the rest are the endings you already know, stuck onto хэн. Which endings those are, and why they have these vowels, is on the overview of the seven cases.

The verb chooses the case, not the English translation

Look again at two lines of that table and the English beside them. Та хэнтэй уулзсан бэ? comes out in English as who did you meet, with no preposition at all — but Mongolian uses the comitative, because уулзах is to meet with somebody. Та хэнээс асуусан бэ? comes out as who did you ask, but Mongolian uses the ablative, because you ask from a person. Sometimes the two languages happen to agree — Та нар архи хэнтэй уумаар байна? (Who do you want to drink arkhi with?) has the comitative and English has with — but that is a coincidence, not something to build on.

The point generalises, and the course says so in as many words: do not pick the case by translating the English preposition. Certain verbs demand certain cases, the pairings are fixed, and they are learned with the verb — exactly as an English learner has to learn depend on, listen to, ask for. This is the single most useful habit on the page, because it applies far beyond question words.

юу: what, and what-with

юу (what) declines in the same way, and the course gives three of its case forms:

Two of those have a consonant that is not in юу itself: a г in юугаар and an н in юунаас. That is not special to this word. Any stem ending in a long vowel does the same — хөдөөгөөр, хөдөөнөөс — and the mechanism is described once on the page on how a word is built.

Note what юугаар asks for. English would often say how did you get here, and the Mongolian question looks like it means by what — and that is exactly right, because the answer comes back in the instrumental: Та юугаар ирсэн бэ? Бид онгоцоор ирсэн. (What did you come by? We came by plane.). Ask with the case you want to be answered in.

хаана: four questions from one word

For a traveller this is the most productive family in the language, and it is the place where English is poorest. English has where, and then needs two words for everything else.

The three-way split between being somewhere, going somewhere and coming from somewhere runs right through Mongolian, and the question words are only its most visible face. Each of these questions expects a particular answer: хаанаас is answered with an ablative, Би Францаас ирсэн (I come from France); хаашаа is answered with руу or рүү, Ховд руу явна (I am going to Khovd). The same three-way split for ordinary nouns is on the page on saying "to" a place.

When, how many, which

хэзээ (when) declines too: Хэзээ явах вэ? (When are you going?) and, with the ablative, Та хэзээнээс Улаанбаатарт суусан бэ? (Since when have you been living in Ulaanbaatar?). Again the н appears before the ending, after the long vowel.

For quantity there are two words, and the difference between them is a distinction Mongolian cares about more than English does. хэдэн asks for an exact figure; хэдий asks for an estimate.

• Та хэдэн хүүхэдтэй вэ? (How many children do you have?) — a number is expected.
• Та хэдэн настай вэ? (How old are you?) — literally how many with-years, and again an exact number.
• Энэ кино дуусахад хэдий хэр хугацаа үлдсэн бэ? (Roughly how long is left before this film ends?) — an approximation is expected.

The course notes that this precise-against-approximate contrast comes back repeatedly in Mongolian, and it is a good thing to be alert to early. хэдэн also stands in front of a noun as how many, and a noun after it stays singular — a rule that belongs with the plural.

ямар (what kind of, which) stands in front of the noun it questions, like any modifier: Одоо ямар хичээл орох вэ? (Which class do you have now?). Doubling it covers a plural or a vaguer range: Ямар ямар хотод очмоор байна вэ? (Which cities would you like to visit?). The word that answers ямар is тийм (that kind), which is one of the demonstratives.

Why and how

яагаад asks for a reason: Та яагаад ирээгүй вэ? (Why didn't you come?), Интернет яагаад ажиллахгүй байна вэ? (Why isn't the internet working?). The answer is introduced by яагаад гэвэл (because): Би маргааш усан санд очно, яагаад гэвэл би завтай. (I'll go to the pool tomorrow, because I have free time.).

яаж asks for the manner: Та Парис хотод яаж ирсэн бэ? (How did you get to Paris?), Чи үүнийг яаж хийсэн бэ? (How did you do this?), Монгол хэлийг яаж хурдан сурах вэ? (How does one learn Mongolian quickly?).

There is a third member of the same family, in Тэгэлгүй яах вэ? (Why not?), where яах is a verb meaning something like to do what. A reading aid, offered as an observation and not as a rule from the course: once you know that verb, the endings on the other two look familiar, because –ж and –аад are ordinary verb endings described on the converbs page. Treating the three as one family is a memory device; the course presents them simply as three question words.

Where the question word stands

English moves its question word to the front of the sentence, always, whatever job it is doing: who did you give the bread to starts with who even though who is the indirect object. Mongolian does not move anything. The question word sits in the slot where the answer would sit.

Чи хэнд талх өгсөн бэ?

you who-DAT bread give-PAST Q

"Who did you give the bread to?"

An answer would name the recipient in the dative-locative — эгчид (to the elder sister), say — in exactly the position хэнд occupies, with the rest of the sentence untouched. The same holds in Та Парис хотод яаж ирсэн бэ? and in Тэд одоо юу хийж байна?: the question word is in the middle, and the verb still closes the sentence. The practical consequence is that you build a question by taking the sentence you would have said and dropping the question word into the hole. You never reorder it.

Beyond the method

The course gives six case forms of хэн and no accusative, which leaves one English question without a direct model: whom did you see?, where whom is the direct object. The pattern of the language would predict *хэнийг, and the asterisk means what it looks like — I could not confirm that form in the course material or in the dictionary entries consulted for this page, so do not learn it from here, and nothing in the exercises below depends on it. What the course does give you are its own ways of asking the same kind of thing, with the case the verb actually wants: хэнтэй уулзсан for meeting someone, хэнээс асуусан for asking someone, хэнд өгсөн for giving to someone.

What this page does not cover

Which particle a question takes, and why there are two different rules for choosing one, is on the question particles page; this page gives only the pairing rule that a question word forces бэ or вэ. The case endings themselves — their forms, and how to choose between them — belong to the page on choosing a case ending. How you answer these questions, and why you cannot answer them with yes or no, is on the page on yes and no.