Mongolian Final Particles

A particle is a word, not an ending

Everything else in Mongolian sticks. Case endings stick, tense endings stick, the plural sticks, and a long word is a stem with four things glued behind it. The particles on this page do not stick. They are written as separate words, they take no endings of their own, and they do not change the grammar of the sentence they close — the verb keeps its tense, the nouns keep their cases, and the sentence would still be well formed if you removed the particle.

What changes is what the speaker is doing with the sentence. English has the same distinction, but it keeps it out of the writing: "the shop opens soon" and "the shop opens soon, mind you" differ in the writing only because English has to drag in a tag; spoken English does it with stress and pitch alone. Mongolian spells it. This is why a word-by-word translation of a Mongolian sentence so often comes out flat and slightly rude: the piece that carried the warmth or the warning was the one piece the translator dropped.

нь, which does two jobs with one form

нь is the most frequent of them, and it follows the word it belongs to. That alone is a reversal worth noticing, because a possessive in English comes in front of its noun and a Mongolian possessive pronoun does too. нь does not.

Its first job is third-person possession — his, her, its, their, with one form for all of them and no difference between singular and plural:

Ном нь сонирхолтой.

book his interesting

"His book is interesting."

So Үнэ нь ямар вэ? is "what is its price?" — literally "price its what", with the particle hanging behind the noun it possesses. The same particle attaches to a noun that is already specified: Батын багш нь хэзээ ирсэн бэ? ("When did Bat's teacher arrive?"), Ахын морь нь Төв аймгийн наадамд түрүүлэв. ("My elder brother's horse won at the Töv provincial festival.")

Its second job has nothing to do with possession. The same нь picks a word out and sets it against something else — the function English gives to "as for" or to a contrastive stress:

Өвөл нь хүйтэн, зун нь халуун.

winter as-for cold summer as-for hot

"Winter is cold; summer is hot."

No possessor is anywhere in that sentence. The particle is doing contrast, and the two halves are balanced against each other by it. Nothing in the form tells you which of the two jobs is in play — the context does, and in practice the two are rarely confusable, because a possessive reading needs a possessor the hearer can identify.

нь has a third use, as the nearest thing Mongolian has to the English word "the". That use belongs to the page on the absence of articles, where it sits beside the other devices that do the same work, and it is not repeated here.

The set that нь belongs to: минь, чинь, маань, тань

нь is not alone. It is the third-person member of a small set of enclitics, each pinned to a person:

They behave as нь does: they follow their noun, they are written separately, and they carry no endings. Because they are separate words they can sit in a sentence that already has a full genitive elsewhere, and more than one of them can appear in a single clause:

Эмээгийн чинь бие нь сайн уу?

grandmother-GEN your body her good Q

"Is your grandmother well?"

Read it piece by piece: эмээгийн is "grandmother's", чинь hooks that grandmother to you, бие is the body or health, and нь hooks the health to the grandmother. English does the whole thing with two words, "your grandmother"; Mongolian builds a chain of two possessions, and the second one is a particle rather than a pronoun. These enclitics also carry affection, which is why they turn up so often in speech addressed to family.

The full possessive pronouns миний, чиний, таны and the rest are a separate system, built on the genitive of the pronouns, and the pronoun page holds them. The reflexive possessive — the ending you must use when the possessor is the subject of the sentence — is a third system again, and it is a suffix rather than a particle.

шүү: the written warning

шүү closes a clause and adds force. It reminds, it warns, it encourages, and it does not touch the grammar: its etymology is the old question биш үү, "is it not?", worn down into an exclamation — which is the same path English took from "isn't it" to "innit".

• Дэлгүүр удахгүй онгойх болсон шүү! — "The shop is about to open, you know!"
• Хүүхдүүдээ, одоо унтах цаг болсон шүү! — "Children, it is bedtime now!"
• Миний хэлснийг чи сайн санаж явна шүү! — "Mind you remember what I told you!"
• Чи их давхивал морио зовооно шүү! — "If you gallop too much you will wear your horse out!"

The strengthened form шүү дээ adds a second particle behind the first and intensifies further. An English speaker's mistake with шүү is not misplacing it — it goes at the end, always — but leaving it out, and sounding curt where a Mongolian ear expected a nudge.

бий: there is, asserted rather than observed

бий states that something exists. It is not байна. байна describes what is in front of you; бий asserts, or asks about, the existence of something you are not currently looking at. The structure is fixed: the place in the dative-locative, then the thing, then the particle.

Манай суманд олон адуу бий.

our district-DAT many horse there-is

"There are many horses in our district."

And so Урд зүгт байгалийн үзэсгэлэнт газар элбэг бий. ("In the south there are plenty of beautiful places.") Questions come in two shapes, and they follow the ordinary rule for question particles. A plain yes-or-no question uses бий юу: Уучлаарай, танд гал бий юу? ("Excuse me, do you have a light?"). A question containing a question word uses бий вэ: Танай сургуульд хэдэн сурагч бий вэ? ("How many pupils are there in your school?"), Таны зургийн цомогт хичнээн зураг бий вэ? ("How many photographs are in your album?")

аа and даа: eight forms for warmth and insistence

These are the particles that make a sentence sound Mongolian, and they are the ones an English speaker is most likely to hear and least likely to produce. There are two series, a plain one and a д– one, and each has four harmonic forms:

Eight forms in all, chosen by the vowels of the word in front, in the same four-way scheme that runs through the rest of the language. They are written separately — this is the point an English eye gets wrong, because the particle sounds like a lengthening of the final syllable and looks as though it ought to be glued on. It is not.

Their first job is warmth and insistence on a statement:

• Сайн байна аа! — "I'm well!", said with feeling, where bare Сайн байна is merely informative
• Болно оо! — "Of course it will do!"
• Чи даарна даа! — "You'll catch cold, you will!"
• Гайгүй дээ! — "No harm done, it's fine."
• Энэ мах сайн байна аа! — "This meat is good!"
• Тийм ээ, чиний зөв! — "Yes indeed, you're right!"

Their second job is calling someone. Attached to a name or a title, the particle is how you address a person out loud: Багш аа! ("Teacher!"), Ээж ээ! ("Mother!"), Аав аа! ("Father!"), Зогсоорой жолооч оо. ("Stop, driver."), Чимэг ээ, ... (addressing someone named Chimeg). Here the choice of form is purely mechanical — багш has а, so аа; ээж has э, so ээ; жолооч has о, so оо. Get the vowel wrong and you have said something that does not exist.

The difference between the plain series and the д– series is one of shading rather than of grammar. The plain forms carry warmth and are what you use to call someone; the д– forms lean towards "I'm telling you", which is why they attach so readily to warnings and reassurances — Чи даарна даа, Гайгүй дээ. Neither changes a tense or a case.

What is not a particle here

Two groups of small words look like these and are not treated with them. уу, үү, юу, юү, бэ and вэ are question particles; they are a system of their own, with two separate selection rules, and they have their own page. зүгээр is not a particle at all but a word in the instrumental case, used as a politeness token, and it belongs with the grammar of address.

The practical consequence of this page is small and immediate. When you hear a recorded sentence end in a syllable you cannot find in the dictionary, stop looking for a verb ending. It is probably one of these eight words, and it is telling you how the speaker feels about what was just said.