The Mongolian Reflexive Possessive: Saying One's Own

A suffix with no English counterpart

Take the English sentence my wife went to the countryside with her father. Whose father? Hers, almost certainly, but English does not say so; it offers the same word, his or her, for the subject's own relative and for somebody else's, and leaves the rest to common sense. Mongolian does not leave it to common sense. It has a dedicated suffix meaning the subject's own, and the method's sentence uses it:

Гэргий минь аавтайгаа хөдөө явсан.

wife my father-COM-REFL countryside go-PAST

"My wife went to the countryside with her own father."

The word аавтайгаа is three pieces: аав (father), then the comitative ending meaning with, then the reflexive possessive. That last piece does all the work of the English word her, and does it more precisely, because it can only ever point back to the subject of the sentence. If the father had been someone else's, this sentence could not have been written.

This is the suffix that English speakers skip, because nothing in their own language reminds them it is needed. Mongolians do not skip it, and a sentence without it where it belongs sounds incomplete in a way that is hard to put a finger on.

The four forms, and where the suffix goes

The suffix has four shapes, chosen by the vowels of the word it lands on: –аа, –оо, –ээ, –өө. The choice is ordinary vowel harmony and nothing special, so if you can already pick between –аас and –өөс, you can pick here; the rule is on the page Mongolian Vowel Harmony: The Rule.

The position is the more important fact. The reflexive comes last. It does not replace a case ending; it sits on top of one. Build a word the method's way and you can watch it arrive:

Nothing to the left of the new piece ever changes. Each suffix is added behind everything already built, which is how Mongolian words grow; the general mechanism is on the page How a Mongolian Word Is Built, and the fixed order of the slots is on In What Order Suffixes Stack. What belongs here is the last slot of all: once the reflexive has been added, the word is finished.

Run the same construction on a word of the other vowel class and every suffix changes vowel with it:

эцэг эх is father and mother, two words meaning parents, and it shows a second habit worth noticing: in a group of words only the last word takes the endings. эцэг never moves. The whole chain lands on эх, and the result, эцэг эхтэйгээ, means with one's own parents.

The same suffix on four different cases

Because it goes last, the reflexive can follow whatever ending happens to be there. These are the method's own words, and between them they show the suffix in every position a beginner will meet.

Two small spelling facts fall out of the table. After a consonant the suffix is bare — аав plus –д ends in д, so аавдаа. After a vowel a г appears to carry it, which is why the comitative gives –тайгаа and not a doubled vowel, and why рүү gives рүүгээ. You do not have to learn that as a rule; you will produce it correctly by imitation, because the alternative is unpronounceable.

On a dative-locative: whose father?

Би аавдаа нэг дугтуй авчирах хэрэгтэй.

I father-DAT-REFL one envelope bring need

"I have to bring my father an envelope."

The subject is би, I, so the reflexive on аавдаа can only mean my father. Note that the sentence does not contain the word for my anywhere. The suffix has made it unnecessary, and that is the normal state of affairs: where English repeats a possessive pronoun, Mongolian usually says nothing and lets the suffix point back.

On an accusative: the object that belongs to the subject

Тэр найзыгаа угтахыг хүсэж байна.

he friend-ACC-REFL meet-ACC want-CONV be-PRES-FUT

"He wants to go and meet his own friend."

This is where the suffix earns its keep. English his friend is genuinely ambiguous: the friend may be the subject's or a third person's. Mongolian has already decided. With the reflexive, the friend is the subject's own; if the friend belonged to somebody else, the sentence would have to say so with a possessive pronoun such as түүний, giving түүний найзыг*, with no reflexive on it at all. Those possessive pronouns are on the page Mongolian Personal Pronouns and Possessives.

On a comitative, and on the direction form

Тэр найзтайгаа идсэн.

he friend-COM-REFL eat-PAST

"He ate with his own friend."

Here the owner is тэр, because тэр is the subject. In Би аавдаа... it was би; in Гэргий минь аавтайгаа... it was the wife. The suffix does not mean my or your or his: it means the subject's, and who that is depends entirely on the sentence. One suffix, seven possible owners, no forms to memorise. It behaves the same way on a two-word stem, which is where the method's толь бичигтэйгээ (with one's own dictionary) comes from. The comitative itself, with its three endings and its missing fourth, has its own page, The Mongolian Comitative.

The same thing happens on the form that marks movement towards a place: Гэр лүүгээ явъя. (Let's go home) and Тэр ээж рүүгээ гүйж явсан. (He ran to his mother). Both are on Movement Towards a Place in Mongolian, where the question of whether that form is a case at all is argued out. The fact that it takes this suffix is one of the arguments.

How it differs from a possessive pronoun

Mongolian has two quite separate ways of saying my book, and they are not interchangeable. миний ном puts a possessive pronoun in front of the noun and names the owner: my book, mine and not yours. The reflexive, номоо*, puts a suffix on the end of the noun and names nobody: it says the book belongs to whoever the subject of this sentence is.

The practical consequence is a habit to build. When the thing you are talking about belongs to the subject of your own sentence, do not reach for the possessive pronoun. Put the reflexive on the end and say nothing about the owner. When the thing belongs to somebody who is not the subject, then you need the pronoun, and the reflexive would be wrong.

Three things this suffix is not

The same two letters do other jobs elsewhere, and confusing them is the commonest mistake after leaving the suffix out.

• Not the final particle аа. In Энэ мах сайн байна аа! (This meat is good!) the аа is a separate word that adds warmth and emphasis to the whole sentence. It is not attached to a noun and it owns nothing. See Mongolian Final Particles.
• Not the enclitics минь, чинь, маань, тань. They follow a noun too, but they name the owner instead of pointing back to the subject, and they are a separate system, set out on Mongolian Final Particles. The two can stand in one sentence: in Гэргий минь аавтайгаа хөдөө явсан., минь says whose wife, while the reflexive on аавтайгаа says only that the father is the subject's.
• Not the genitive. номын is of the book, a modifier standing in front of another noun; the reflexive stands at the end of its own noun and modifies nothing. The genitive is on The Mongolian Genitive.

Two consequences of that last position, and both are practical. The first is that the reflexive marks the right-hand edge of a word: nothing follows it, so when you reach it while reading you have reached the end of that word, and the next letter begins another one. The second is that the suffix is not a flourish you add when you feel like being precise. Where the owner is the subject, Mongolian puts it in, and the sentence that leaves it out is the one that sounds wrong — which is the reverse of what an English speaker expects, since in English the word own is always optional and always slightly emphatic.

Reading it in the wild

A practical reading reflex, and it costs nothing to apply. When a word ends in –аа, –оо, –ээ or –өө and there is a case ending in front of it, stop and ask whose. The answer is always the same: the subject's. Then look at the front of the sentence to see who that is. Four letters at the end of one word will have told you something English would have needed a relative clause to make clear.