Mongolian Greetings, and How to Take Your Leave

Three pieces, and all three come back

The ordinary Mongolian greeting is Сайн байна уу? Set out as a gloss it has nothing exotic in it:

Сайн байна уу?

good be-PRES-FUT Q

"Are you well?"

сайн is the adjective "good, well". байна is the verb "to be" in its present form. уу is the particle that turns a statement into a yes-or-no question. Three ordinary words, each of them a page of this dossier in its own right.

Two absences are worth naming, because they are the two things an English speaker expects and does not find. There is no pronoun: Mongolian verbs are not marked for person at all, so a second-person subject is simply left out when the situation makes it obvious. And there is no inversion. English asks a question by moving the verb — "you are well" becomes "are you well" — while Mongolian leaves the word order exactly as it was and hangs a particle on the end. The verb closes the sentence in a Mongolian statement, and it still closes it in a Mongolian question, with the particle behind it.

The vowel of that particle is not free. байна has the vowel а, so the particle is уу; a word with front vowels takes үү instead. That selection, and the different rule that governs бэ and вэ, belong to the page on question particles.

There is no contentless hello

English keeps two things apart. "Hello" carries no information and expects no answer; "how are you" is a question, even if a worn one. Mongolian has only the second kind. Сайн байна уу? is a question with a question particle on the end of it, and it expects a reply — which is why the replies below are not optional politeness but the other half of a two-part exchange.

The practical consequence is immediate and slightly uncomfortable for a visitor. If you produce the greeting and keep walking, you have asked somebody a question and failed to wait for the answer. If you are greeted and say nothing, you have left a question hanging. The exchange is short — a greeting, a reply, a request for news, a reply, a question about the household, a reply — but it is a sequence, and skipping a move in it reads the way an unanswered question reads in English.

The variants, and what each one changes

The greeting has a small family of forms, and every member differs from the base by one identifiable grammatical operation.

Сайн уу? drops байна altogether. Mongolian tolerates a predicate with no verb — a sentence can consist of a subject and an adjective and nothing else — so the shortened greeting is not a lazy contraction but an ordinary verbless predicate with a question particle on it.

Сайн байцгаана уу? is the one form here with a piece of morphology you cannot guess. Between the stem бай– and the present ending sits a collective suffix, so the greeting means "are you all well" and is what you say on entering a household rather than meeting one person. The collective suffix has its own page; what matters in a greeting is only that the extra syllable is doing the work English does with "you all".

Таны бие сайн уу? is a different construction entirely:

Таны бие сайн уу?

you-GEN body good Q

"Is your health well?"

The genitive таны stands in front of the noun it specifies, which is the Mongolian order for every possessive, and the thing asked about is бие, the body. English asks about the person; Mongolian asks about the body, politely, through a possessive.

The answers, and why they are not "yes"

A Mongolian yes-or-no question is not usually answered with a word for yes. It is answered by repeating the predicate, which is why all three standard replies are made of the material of the question itself:

• Сайн. — the adjective alone, the shortest reply
• Сайн байна. — the full predicate, neutral and complete
• Сайн байна аа! — the same, with a final particle for warmth

The third form is the one a learner should notice. аа is a separate word that adds nothing to the information and a great deal to the tone; its eight harmonic forms belong to the page on final particles. Without it, Сайн байна is correct and slightly flat. The general question of how Mongolian says yes and no sits on its own page; the point here is that a greeting is answered by its own predicate.

The follow-up questions, and the trap inside one of them

A greeting in Mongolian is the first move of a short fixed exchange rather than a self-contained courtesy, and the second move asks for news. Here the English speaker meets the single most common confusion in the whole question system:

Сонин сайхан юу байна?

news nice what be-PRES-FUT

"What's new?"

There is no question particle at the end of that sentence, and it is still a question. The reason is that юу here is not the particle at all: it is the question word meaning "what", and a clause that already contains a question word never takes уу or үү. Two shorter versions of the same enquiry are in use, Сонин юу вэ? and Сонин юутай вэ?, the second with юу put into the comitative — "with what news?". Which of the open-question particles a sentence ends in, and the full account of the trap that the word юу sets for a beginner, are the business of the page on question particles.

The expected replies are again whole sentences. Тайван байна. ("All is quiet.") is the standard answer, and it uses the same байна as the greeting. Then comes the household question: Танайхан сайн уу? ("Are your people well?"), answered Манайхан сайн! ("My people are well."). Which of these possessive household forms to use is a matter of the grammar of address.

The pastoral greetings, which are real sentences about real things

Two further openings are worth knowing not because a visitor must produce them but because hearing them explains what a Mongolian greeting is for. Сайхан зусаж байна уу? asks "are you summering well?" — the stem зус– is to spend the summer, and зусаж байна is the progressive, a converb in –ж plus байна. The question is about how the summer pasture is going. And Мал сүрэг тарган тавтай юу? asks whether the livestock are fat and content, with тавтай formed by the comitative suffix that turns nouns into adjectives — the same suffix that closes this page in Баяртай.

These are not polite noises. They are enquiries about the thing that determines whether the household eats, put in ordinary grammar, and they are the reason the greeting sequence is longer than the English "hello".

Leaving: the asymmetry English does not have

English says goodbye in one direction. Mongolian distinguishes the person who is leaving from the person who is staying, and each says a different thing.

Glossed, the first two are transparent:

Сайн яваарай!

good go-IMP

"Have a good journey."

Сайн сууж байгаарай!

good sit-CONV be-IMP

"Stay well."

Both carry the same ending, –аарай, which is the imperative of invitation rather than of command — it proposes a future action, it does not order an immediate one, and the whole series it belongs to is set out on the imperatives page. That single ending is the backbone of the whole farewell system, and it also explains why farewells sound like instructions when translated word for word: they are instructions, softly put. The verb бай– takes a г before the ending, giving байгаарай, which is the one irregularity in the set. The vowel of the ending — –аарай, –оорой, –ээрэй or –өөрэй — is chosen by the stem, from the four-form suffix table.

Баяртай! works for both parties and is the one everybody learns first. Its structure is the pleasant surprise of this page: it is баяр, "joy", with the comitative ending –тай, so the universal Mongolian goodbye is not a verb at all but an adjective meaning "with joy". The comitative, which does so much work building adjectives out of nouns, has its own page.

The rest of the leave-taking set is built the same way:

• Дараа дахин ирээрэй. — "Come again later." The host's invitation, with ир– taking the front-vowel form of the ending.
• Сайхан унтаарай! — "Sleep well." Said at night, to either party.
• Сайхан хооллоорой! — "Enjoy your meal." The stem хоолло– has о, so the ending appears as –оорой.

What to take away

Every phrase on this page is a sentence, and every sentence on it is built from four devices: the verb байна, the question particle, the invitational imperative –аарай, and the comitative. Learn the phrases as blocks if you like — they have a melody that is better caught by ear than by eye, and the recordings are where that is learned. But each block decomposes, and once it does, the pieces are reusable: you can build a farewell for a verb nobody taught you, and you can hear what somebody is asking you about their sheep.