Participles: Where Mongolian and English Part Company

The book you wrote

English builds a phrase like the book you wrote by starting with the noun and hanging a clause off the back of it. The noun comes first, then a relative pronoun if one is wanted, then a subject, then a verb. Mongolian reverses the whole thing:

• таны бичсэн ном
• you-GEN write-PART book
• "the book you wrote"

Read the Mongolian from the right and you get the English almost word for word. Read it from the left, as you must when you are actually listening to it, and nothing is where an English speaker expects it to be: the noun arrives last, the verb is in the middle in a form that cannot close a sentence, and the person who did the writing is in the genitive, as though the book belonged to them.

There is no relative pronoun anywhere. Mongolian has nothing that corresponds to who, which or that in this job, and nothing that corresponds to the English option of leaving the pronoun out. The construction is carried entirely by the shape of the verb, and the verb forms that can carry it are called participles.

Building one, from the English out

Take the work that was done. Three steps and you have it.

1. Find the noun being described. Here it is work, ажил. It goes last.
2. Put the verb into a participle. Was done is finished business, so the past participle: хийсэн.
3. Set the participle in front of the noun: хийсэн ажил.

Now a longer one, the man who arrived yesterday. Same three steps, with the time word slotted in at the front where it would stand in any Mongolian clause:

• Өчигдөр ирсэн хүн энд сууж байна.
• yesterday arrive-PART man here sit-CONV be-PRES-FUT
• "The man who arrived yesterday is sitting here."

Notice that the three words Өчигдөр ирсэн хүн behave as a single noun phrase. They are the subject of the sentence, and the sentence then carries on past them with its own verb. That is the shape to train your eye on, because a participle phrase can grow long and a reader who has not noticed it will try to end the sentence halfway through.

The five participles

The method teaches five, and each one brings its own relation in time to the noun it stands in front of.

Three of those five you already know by another name, and that is the single most useful thing to notice here. –сан is the ending you learned as the everyday past. –х is the form every verb is listed under in a dictionary. –даг is the ending you learned for habits. They are not three endings that happen to look like three others; they are the same three endings, doing their second job. What each of them means when it closes a sentence instead belongs to the page on the past, the page on verbs and the page on the present and future.

Which one you choose in front of a noun follows from what you are saying about it, and the four contrasts below are worth learning as a set, because English spreads them over four quite different constructions:

• уншсан ном (a book that has been read) — finished.
• уншиж байгаа ном (a book being read) — under way.
• унших ном (a book to read) — still ahead.
• ярьдаг хэл (a spoken language) — as a standing fact.

Two more of the method's own, both with the –х participle: ирэх жил (the coming year) and хийх ажил (work to be done). English reaches for a participle in the first, an infinitive in the second and a relative clause in унших ном — three constructions for one Mongolian form, which is why the method glosses the whole pattern with a single phrase, which is to….

The doer goes in the genitive

When the participle has a subject of its own — somebody did the writing, and you want to say who — that subject takes the genitive. Hence таны бичсэн ном, where таны is the genitive of та (you).

For an English speaker this is the detail that feels most arbitrary and is in fact the most revealing. Look at what the construction has become: a genitive, then a describing word, then a noun. That is exactly the shape of миний найз (my friend) and монгол хэлний багш (the teacher of Mongolian). Mongolian has not built a relative clause at all. It has built an ordinary noun phrase, and the verb inside it has been demoted to a describing word like any adjective. Once you see the participle phrase as a very large adjective, the genitive stops being a surprise.

Which of the genitive's several endings to write is a separate question, answered on the page on the genitive.

Where the phrase starts and where it stops

A practical reading method, because this is the construction that makes long Mongolian sentences look impenetrable. When you hit a participle, do not try to end the clause there. Instead:

1. Keep reading until you reach a noun. The participle phrase ends on that noun, and everything from the start of the phrase up to and including it is one block.
2. Ask what role the block plays. Whatever ending the noun carries — a case suffix, a plural, nothing at all — applies to the whole block, not to the noun alone.
3. Carry on with the sentence, which still needs its own verb at the end.

Try it on a sentence with a participle phrase sitting inside a larger clause: Бидэнд францаар ярьдаг нэг орчуулагч хэрэгтэй байна (we need a translator who speaks French). The participle is ярьдаг; keep going and you reach орчуулагч; so францаар ярьдаг нэг орчуулагч is one block, a translator who speaks French, and the rest of the sentence says that we need one. The English and the Mongolian contain the same words in almost exactly the opposite order.

And one with the –аа participle inside it: Тэр дуулж байгаа хүн хэн бэ? (who is that person singing?). The block is Тэр дуулж байгаа хүн, and the question word and its particle follow.

–гч, the participle that turned into a noun

The fourth of the five behaves differently from the others, and the difference is visible in the table above: its example is a single word. –гч makes a form meaning the one who does this, and many of those forms have simply become nouns. орчуулагч is a translator. ажиллагч is one who works. English does the same thing with –er, which is why this is the one participle that gives an English speaker no trouble at all: translate gives translator, work gives worker.

It is still a participle, though, and it keeps the participle's position: when it describes rather than names, it stands in front of its noun like the rest of them.

The fifth, and an honest note about it

The fifth participle is cited as –аа / –оо / –ээ / –өө. You have already been using it without knowing: байгаа is бай– plus this ending, which is why уншиж байгаа ном belongs in the table of participles rather than with the tenses.

Where the method shows it in isolation, it shows it inside a negative answer: Та энэ зургийг үзсэн үү? — Үзээгүй! (have you seen this picture? — I haven't!). That is a real and extremely common use, and it is also a negation, so the form үзээгүй is taken apart on the page on saying no rather than here. What belongs here is only the fact that the –аа in it is the fifth participle, and that байгаа is the form you will meet it in most often.

A participle can also end the sentence

The second job, and the one you will use more. A participle can stand at the end of a sentence as its predicate, exactly where a finite verb would go:

• Би Францаас ирсэн. (I come from France.)
• Миний гэр Парис хотод байдаг. (my house is in Paris.)

The method makes a point about these that is worth keeping, because it explains the next section. A sentence that ends in a participle is treated as having a predicate of nominal character — the sentence closes on something that is still, grammatically, a describing word rather than a full verb. Compare the way an adjective works: өндөр уул is a high mountain, a noun phrase, but Уул өндөр is the mountain is high, a complete sentence with no verb in it. Position alone made the difference, and a participle does the same thing.

юм and мөн, which close a predicate off

That opens a small ambiguity, and Mongolian has two words to shut it. If a sentence ends on a nominal predicate, a listener cannot always tell whether the predicate is finished or whether it is about to turn out to be the describing word for yet another noun. юм and мөн settle it: they sit at the very end of the sentence and mark the predicate as closed.

• юм affirms: Энэ маш сайхан дурсамж юм. (this is an unforgettable memory.) The pattern X бол Y юм is the standard way of giving a definition, and юм can be followed by a question particle.
• мөн confirms, and with үү behind it asks for confirmation: Энэ зам Хархорин орох зам мөн үү? (this is the road to Kharkhorin, isn't it?) — a sentence which, incidentally, has a participle phrase in it too, Хархорин орох зам.

Both are invariable. Neither ever takes a case suffix, which is the test that distinguishes the copula юм from the ordinary noun юм (thing) — the noun declines perfectly normally, as in энэ юмыг (this thing, as a direct object). Same three letters, two entirely different words, and the presence of an ending tells you which you are looking at.

Not on this page

Two neighbouring constructions are easy to confuse with this one and are treated elsewhere. Reporting what somebody said or thought, and turning a whole clause into the object of a verb, are done with гэж and with the –х participle plus a case ending — a different mechanism, on the page on complex sentences. And linking two actions by putting the first verb into a converb is not this construction either; it is on the page on converbs. The rule that a describing word always precedes what it describes, of which this whole page is the largest application, is stated once on the page on word order.