Mongolian Has No a and No the: What Does the Work Instead

The two words that are not there

English speakers use a and the several times in every sentence, automatically, and the choice between them is one of the last things a foreign learner of English ever gets right. Mongolian spares you that entirely, because it has no articles. There is no word for a, no word for the, and no ending that corresponds to either.

That is not the same as saying Mongolian cannot make the distinction. It can, and it does it constantly. What it does not do is make it in the same place. English loads the information onto a little word in front of the noun. Mongolian distributes it over five quite different devices, some of them case endings, some of them separate words, and one of them nothing more than where the noun stands. Learning this page is largely a matter of unlearning the habit of looking for a single slot.

Device one: the mark on the direct object

This is the big one, and it will surprise you, because the information lands on an ending that an English grammar would file under something else entirely. Here are two of the method's own sentences, built from the same words:

Би энэ номыг уншсан.

I this book-ACC read-PAST

"I read this book."

Би ном уншсан.

I book read-PAST

"I read a book."

The difference is the accusative ending on ном. When the object is a particular one that has been pointed out, the ending goes on. When it has not, the ending stays off and the noun stands bare. The method makes the point by writing three pairs side by side:

Read the right-hand column carefully, because it is where a careless page would mislead you. The unmarked objects are translated with the, not with a. The ending is not an article in disguise and it does not mean the. What it means is that the speaker has singled this thing out, and the usual way of singling something out is to put a word like энэ (this) in front of it. An object that nobody has singled out may still be perfectly definite in English: the picture in front of us, the job we were both doing. Mongolian simply does not insist on saying so.

How that ending is formed, which of its three shapes a given word takes, and the other circumstances in which it disappears, are all on The Mongolian Accusative. What belongs here is only what it tells you: that the object has been pointed at.

Device two: a word in front of the noun

The commonest pointer is энэ, and its partner for things further away is тэр. Put either in front of a noun and the noun is pointed out: энэ ном (this book), тэр хүн (that person), энэ кино (this film).

It is tempting to use them as a replacement for the, and that is the single most reliable way to sound foreign. энэ really means this, not the. A speaker who attaches it to every noun is not translating English articles; they are saying this very book, this very picture, this very job, over and over, like someone pointing at everything in the room. The full set of these words, including where and there, and the verb forms built on the same stem, is on the page энэ and тэр: Mongolian Demonstratives.

Device three: a possessive

A possessive does the same job as a pointer, and the method uses it that way:

Би танай хотыг мэдэхгүй.

I your city-ACC know-NEG

"I don't know your city."

The ending appears on хот only because танай is in front of it. The method says so explicitly: the bare word would have taken no ending. The same thing happens with миний: in Миний нэрийг Сарангэрэл гэдэг. (My name is Sarangerel) the word for name carries the mark because a possessive has singled it out.

This is worth noticing as a general pattern rather than a list of cases. Anything that narrows a noun down to one particular item — this, that, your, my, a genitive in front of it — puts the mark on the object. Nothing in the language announces the rule; you read it off the fact that the mark is there. The possessive words themselves are on Mongolian Personal Pronouns and Possessives.

Device four: the particle after the noun

Mongolian has a short word, нь, placed after a noun. The method gives it two jobs, and only one of them belongs on this page: it marks possession in the third person, which is treated on Mongolian Final Particles, and it singles a word out for attention, which is the job that comes closest to doing the work of the:

Өвөл нь хүйтэн, зун нь халуун.

winter the cold summer the hot

"The winter is cold and the summer is hot."

Nobody has said which winter, and no possessive is involved. нь simply picks out winter and summer as the things under discussion — in a particular place, understood from the conversation and never named. The method's own translation adds a parenthesis to catch this: the winter there is cold. An English speaker reading that sentence hears exactly what the definite article does in his own language, and this is the closest Mongolian gets to it.

Two cautions. First, нь is not obligatory and is not a grammatical requirement the way an English article is; sentences without it are not incomplete. Second, its possessive use and its emphatic use shade into each other, and the method says so rather than pretending to a clean rule. Everything else нь does, and the related words минь, чинь, маань and тань, belong to Mongolian Final Particles. Here it appears only as the nearest thing to a definite marker.

Device five: where the noun stands

The last device is the softest and the hardest to describe, and it is a tendency rather than a rule. Compare two of the method's sentences:

• Морь хойрго. (The horse is slow.)
• Монголд мал их байна. (There are a lot of animals in Mongolia.)

Both nouns are bare. Neither has a pointer, a possessive or a particle. Yet the first comes out as the horse and the second as animals, and the reason is position. A bare noun standing at the head of the sentence, as its subject, is normally something already known: we are talking about a horse we can both see. A bare noun sitting just in front of the predicate is normally new information, an indefinite quantity of something: there are animals in Mongolia, not the animals.

Treat that as a reading habit rather than a rule you can lean on. It will often tell you how to translate a bare noun into English, and it will occasionally be overridden by context. The arrangement of the sentence as a whole, and which elements can move, is on Mongolian Word Order.

When the choice genuinely stays open

Here is the case that makes the whole page honest. The method glosses хотын байр as city flat, with no article at all, because the Mongolian has not said whether it is a city flat or the city flat. The same silence sits inside цайны газар (tea place, that is, a restaurant) and монгол хэлний багш (teacher of Mongolian): any English version of those two has to add an article that the Mongolian does not contain.

This is not the author being vague. It is an accurate report of what the Mongolian says. хотын байр is a flat, of the city sort. Nothing in it is definite and nothing in it is indefinite, because the language has not raised the question. An English translator has to raise it, because English has no way of writing a noun without deciding, and whichever article he picks he will have added something the original did not contain.

What to do with your English sentence

A procedure that works while you are still slow. Take your English sentence and go through the nouns one at a time.

1. Is the noun the direct object? If it is, decide whether you are pointing at a particular one. If yes, it takes the accusative mark and usually a word like энэ in front of it. If no, leave it bare.
2. Does the hearer already know which one? If so, and nothing else in the sentence says it, нь after the noun will carry that.
3. Does it belong to somebody? Then a possessive in front of it settles both the ownership and the pointing in one move.
4. Otherwise, say the noun and stop. A bare Mongolian noun is a complete, idiomatic, grammatical noun. It is not missing anything.

The fourth step is the one English speakers resist longest, and it is the one that matters most. There is nothing to add. A sentence such as Би ном уншсан. is not a rough draft waiting for an article; it is the finished sentence, and a Mongolian hearing it knows exactly as much as the speaker intended to say.

One more thing that stays unmarked

The same restraint shows up in the plural. Mongolian marks the plural far less often than English does, and a bare noun can mean one thing or many: ном is book or books depending on the sentence. That is a separate subject with its own page, The Mongolian Plural, and When Not to Mark It, but it is worth knowing now, because the two habits reinforce each other. An English noun carries two pieces of grammar, an article and a number, and a Mongolian noun can carry neither and still be complete.

Where this page stops

The shapes of the accusative ending, and the other situations in which it is left off, are on The Mongolian Accusative; the partnership between that page and this one is that it owns the morphology and this one owns the problem. The system of pointers, энэ and тэр and their relatives, is on Mongolian Demonstratives. нь in its other jobs is on Mongolian Final Particles. And the possessive words are on Mongolian Personal Pronouns and Possessives.