Mongolian Imperatives: Six Degrees of Asking

One English form, six Mongolian ones

English has a single imperative. Come in is the same word whether you say it to a child, to a colleague or to your wife's grandmother. Everything that softens it is added from outside the verb: please, would you, do come in, a rising tone, a smile. Strip those away and the bare form is harsh, which is why English speakers learn to pad it heavily.

Mongolian does the opposite. The register is built into the ending, so the choice of ending is the choice of manner. There is no padding word that rescues a form chosen wrongly, and уучлаарай (excuse me) is not a politeness word you can sprinkle on an order — it is itself one of these endings, on the verb уучлах (to forgive). So the first thing to learn here is not a paradigm. It is that you must decide, every time, how much distance to put between yourself and the person you are talking to.

Six forms carry that decision. Two of them you will use constantly, two you will use often, and two come up more rarely. Two further forms, which the method only lists, are set out at the end of the page as reading knowledge.

1. The bare stem: the immediate order

The dictionary gives a verb in –х. Take those two letters off and what remains is both the stem and the shortest imperative. Nothing is added:

• сонсох (to listen) gives Сонс! (Listen!)
• бичих (to write) gives Бич! (Write!)
• орох (to enter) gives Ор! (Come in!)
• явах (to go) gives Яв! (Go!)
• авах (to take) gives Ав! (Take it!)
• унших (to read) gives Унш! (Read!)
• харах (to look) gives Хар! (Look!)
• үзэх (to watch) gives Үз! (Watch!)
• сурах (to study) gives Сур! (Study!)
• захиалах (to order) gives Захиал! (Order it!)

Two spelling points. When the vowel in front of –х is a long one, it stays long: асуух (to ask) gives Асуу!, суух (to sit) gives Суу!, уух (to drink) gives Уу!, хийх (to do) gives Хий!. And one verb behaves oddly: ярих (to speak) has the stem ярь, with a soft sign, so the order is Ярь!, and with the polite pronoun in front of it, Та ярь! (Speak!).

In a sentence the imperative closes it, as every Mongolian predicate does, with everything else in front:

• Маргааш ир!
• tomorrow come-IMP
• "Come back tomorrow!"

Also Билет ав! (Buy the ticket!), Эндээс гар! (Get out of here!), Самбарт оч! (Come to the blackboard!), Зүүн гар тийшээ эргэ! (Turn to your left!). This is the form for family, for close friends, for children, for the inside of a classroom or a truck cab. It is not the form for a stranger, a shopkeeper, an official or anyone older than you.

2. Doubling the stem, which softens it

Say the bare stem twice and the order becomes an invitation: Та ор ор! (Do come in!), Чи суу суу! (Have a seat!), Зогс зогс! (Let's stop there!).

3. –аарай: the invitation turned towards later

This is the everyday polite imperative, and it is not a stronger version of the bare stem — it means something different. It asks for an action in the future, when the moment comes, rather than this second. It has four harmonic shapes, –аарай / –оорой / –ээрэй / –өөрэй, chosen by the vowels of the stem; the full set of four-form suffixes is laid out once in the dossier, in the four-form suffix table, and this page simply uses it.

• ав– gives аваарай, ажилл– gives ажиллаарай, март– gives мартаарай, унт– gives унтаарай, тусл– gives туслаарай, уулз– gives уулзаарай, яв– gives яваарай
• оч– gives очоорой, хоолл– gives хооллоорой
• ир– gives ирээрэй, сэр– gives сэрээрэй
• өг– gives өгөөрэй

The verb байх (to be) inserts a г: байгаарай, as in Сайн сууж байгаарай! (Stay well!).

In use, the forward-looking sense shows clearly:

• Та өнөөдөр манайд очоорой!
• you today our.place-DAT visit-IMP
• "Do come round to our place today."

• Та энэ номыг түүнд өгөөрэй!
• you this book-ACC he-DAT give-IMP
• "Give him this book."

And: Дараа ирээрэй! (Come again!), Ном аваарай! (Take the book!), Сайхан унтаарай! (Sleep well!), Сайхан хооллоорой! (Enjoy your meal!), Туслаарай! (Help!), Чи багштайгаа уулзаарай! (Go and see your teacher.), Та манайд маргааш өглөө очоорой! (Come to our place tomorrow morning.). The same ending sits inside two phrases you will hear on your first day, Уучлаарай (excuse me) and Сайн яваарай (safe journey) — as set phrases those belong to the page on greetings and leave-taking, but the ending is this one.

A useful consequence: because –аарай points at a later moment, it is the natural form for instructions, advice and good wishes, and it is almost always the safe choice when you are not sure. If you are a guest, a customer or a learner, reach for –аарай by default.

4. –ч: asking for a service out loud

Spoken Mongolian has a request form in –ч, attached after a vowel — a long one in most of the attested forms — and used when you are asking somebody to do something for you. The method gives it in sentences rather than as a full paradigm, so take the attested forms as they stand and do not build new ones by analogy: ажиллач, ирээч, өгөөч, заагаач.

• Чи надад монгол хэл заагаач.
• you I-DAT Mongolian language teach-IMP
• "Teach me Mongolian, would you."

Very often it lands on өгөх (to give) placed after a first verb, which turns the request into "do it for me": Та надад үүнийг монголоор орчуулаад өгөөч. (Could you translate this into Mongolian for me?), Намайг найзуудтайгаа танилцуулж өгөөч. (Introduce me to your friends.), Чи гараад ирээч. (Come on out and join me.), Надад заагаад өг. (Show me.). The two-verb chaining that this depends on belongs to the page on converbs; here, notice only that the request ending goes on the last verb, never on the first.

5. –ъя, –ъё, –ье: counting yourself in

English needs an extra word for this, let's, and it is not an imperative at all. Mongolian has a real first-person form, used when the speaker intends to act, alone or with the listener:

Across the forms the method gives, the pattern is readable: after a stem ending in a consonant a hard sign appears with back-vowel stems (Авъя, Явъя, Унтъя) and a soft sign with front-vowel stems (Үзье, Бичье), while a stem ending in a vowel or in й takes the ending directly (Хайя). The method's Тоглоё, on the stem тогл–, shows a linking о in place of the hard sign; take it as it stands rather than building others on it. A full sentence: Тэдэнтэй хамт тоглоё. (Let's play with them.)

6. –цгаа–: all of us, together

When the point is that a group acts jointly, the suffix –цгаа– goes in before the first-person ending: Орос руу хамт явцгаая! (Let's go to Russia together!), Хамтдаа тоолж сурцгаая! (Let's learn to count together!), Одоо зах дээр очицгооё. (Let's go to the market now.), Орой болж байна, гэртээ харьцгаая! (It's getting late, let's head home!). The suffix itself, its harmonic shapes and its position in the stack belong to the page on –цгаа; what matters here is the effect, which English can only get with extra words like together or all of us.

The two forms you only need to recognise

The method's appendix records two more. A third-person imperative in –г, as in ажиллаг (let him work), and a solemn form in –гтун / –гтүн, as in ажиллагтун, which belongs to proclamations, ceremony and older written style. The method lists them without sentence examples, so treat them as reading knowledge: recognise them, do not produce them.

битгий: telling someone not to

There is no negative ending for the imperative. The word битгий goes in front of the verb and the verb keeps whatever form it already had:

• Чи одоо битгий унт!
• you now NEG sleep-IMP
• "Don't go to sleep now!"

With the bare stem: Та нар битгий суу! (Don't sit down!), Чи битгий их ярь! (Don't talk so much!). With –аарай, which keeps the softer register intact: Та битгий мартаарай! (Please don't forget.), Битгий аваарай! (Don't take it.), Тийшээ битгий яваарай! (Don't go over there.), Манайд битгий ирээрэй! (Don't come to our place.), Та Москва хотод битгий удаан байгаарай! (Don't stay long in Moscow.). So the choice of register survives the negation: you can forbid politely or bluntly, and the ending is what decides which. The place of битгий among the other negative words — үгүй, биш, байхгүй, –гүй — belongs to the page on negation.

Choosing, in one table

One last practical point. These endings are short, and three of them differ only in a vowel you may not yet hear reliably — аваарай, очоорой, ирээрэй, өгөөрэй. On the page you can see the difference; in a room you have to hear it, and the ending is where a Mongolian ear places the manner of the whole sentence. This is one of the forms worth listening to many times before trying to produce it.