The Order Suffixes Stack In

Slots, not a free-for-all

Once you can form a plural, a case and a possessive, the next question arrives on its own: if a word needs two of them, which goes first? English never asks this, because English keeps those pieces apart as separate words and arranges them with word order instead. Mongolian puts them all inside one word, so the sequence has to be fixed, and it is.

The method states the order of a noun in four words: stem, plural, case, possessive. That is the whole thing. Add the derivational suffixes that build the stem in the first place, and you have five positions, each of which is either filled or skipped — never moved, never doubled.

Read the fourth row as a word: найз нартайгаа (with my friends). The fifth is найруулагчдаас (from the directors), the sixth Европчуудад (to the Europeans), the seventh аавдаа (to my father). The plural slot of that sixth row is filled by –чууд, the plural reserved for groups of people, and nothing in the word builds a new stem, which is why its second column is empty. The fifth row is the opposite case: –гч builds a stem out of a verb, and the plural then follows it.

The order is not arbitrary

Each suffix attaches to the whole word built so far, not to the bare stem. So the sequence of the pieces is the sequence in which the meanings apply, from the inside out. найз нартайгаа is not a random pile; it is friend, then friends, then with friends, then with my friends. Each step takes the previous word as its base. Try to reverse two of them and the result is not a different shade of meaning, it is nothing at all.

And here is the thing worth holding on to, because it makes the whole system predictable for an English speaker: English assembles the same meanings in the mirror order, in front of the noun. Compare:

• эцэг эхтэйгээ — parents – with – my — against English with my parents;
• найруулагчдаас — director – PL – from — against English from the directors;
• аавдаа — father – to – my — against English to my father.

Take the English phrase, read it backwards, and you have the Mongolian word, piece for piece. That is not a coincidence or a memory trick: it is the same information in the same logical nesting, written from the other end. Once you see it you stop having to remember the order at all, and you certainly stop producing things like a possessive in front of a case.

One filler per slot

A word carries at most one case suffix. This sounds obvious and it is the error English speakers actually make, because English can stack prepositions — out from under the table — and a learner reaches for the same move. In Mongolian, if a noun needs a second relation, the second relation is carried by a postposition or by a different construction, not by a second ending.

The plural behaves the same way: one plural marker, chosen from several that are not interchangeable, and that choice belongs to the page on the plural. The slot chart tells you where the plural goes; it does not tell you which plural to use, or whether to use one at all.

The verb has its own queue

A verb stacks too, and with the same logic: the pieces that change what the action is come first, and the piece that fixes tense or mood comes last. So the order is stem, voice, mood.

The clearest demonstration is the collective suffix –цгаа–, which adds the idea of doing something together. It sits between the stem and the ending, and whatever ending you then choose simply attaches behind it:

• бай– plus –цгаа– plus –на gives байцгаана (you are, all of you);
• ярь– plus –цгаа– plus –даг gives ярьцгаадаг (they all speak, habitually);
• сур– plus –цгаа– plus –я gives сурцгаая (let us learn, together);
• яв– plus –цгаа– plus –х gives явцгаах (to go, all together);
• сур– plus –цгаа– plus –маар gives сурцгаамаар (wanting to learn, together).

Five different endings, one position for the collective, and the collective never moves. The causative –уул– / –үүл–, the passive –гд– and the cooperative –лц– occupy the same position: on the stem ажилл– (to work) the method lists ажиллуул–, ажиллагд–, ажиллалц– and ажиллацгаа–, all of them still stems waiting for an ending. What each of those four actually means is on the page on verb voices.

Notice what this does to the reading method. If you expect a Mongolian verb to be stem plus one ending, a three-piece verb will defeat you: you will look for ярьцгаа– in a dictionary and not find it. Expect the middle slot and the word falls apart cleanly.

There is also a reason the mood suffix has to be the outermost piece, and it is a reason about sentences rather than about words. The mood suffix is what turns a stem into something that can close a statement. Put anything behind it and you have changed what the word is for. That is why a Mongolian sentence can be read from its last word backwards: the final word of the sentence is the predicate, and the final piece of that word says what kind of predicate it is. The shape of the sentence as a whole is on the page on word order.

Peeling two words with the chart

The chart earns its keep when you meet a word you have never seen. Work from the right and name each slot as you strip it.

1. Европчуудад. The last piece is –ад, slot four, a case. Before it, –чууд, a plural for people. What is left is Европ. So: a case ending on a plural of people, and you have to the Europeans without having looked anything up except the stem.
2. ярьцгаадаг. The last piece is –даг, a mood suffix, so this is a verb and the word is finished. Before it, –цгаа–, the collective. What is left is ярь– (to speak). So: they habitually speak, together.

Notice that in both cases the last piece told you what kind of word you were holding before you knew what it meant. That is the single most useful thing the order does for a reader, and it is the reason to learn the slots as a sequence rather than learning each suffix in isolation.

Where the negative goes

The negative suffix –гүй takes the outermost position of all, behind the mood suffix rather than in front of it. That is unusual enough among the world's languages to be worth seeing in a row:

• суудаг gives суудаггүй;
• мэдэх gives мэдэхгүй;
• авсан gives авсангүй;
• ажиллах gives ажиллахгүй.

In each case the tense or mood suffix is already in place and the negative is glued behind it, so the word still ends in the piece that says not. English, once again, does the reverse and puts its negative in front. The system of negation — which word or suffix you need for which kind of no — is on the page on saying no.

Groups of words have one queue between them

When two words act as a single unit, the slots belong to the group, not to each word, and everything is loaded onto the last word:

• эцэг эх (parents) gives эцэг эхтэйгээ (with my parents) — the case and the possessive both land on эх;
• толь бичиг (dictionary) gives толь бичигтэйгээ (with one's dictionary);
• найз нар is already a group of this kind, since нар is written as a separate word, and –тай and –гаа both attach to it.

So a long Mongolian word often marks a phrase rather than a single idea, and the first word of the phrase can look bare and unfinished. It is not: it has simply been left for the end of the queue to speak on its behalf.

A test you can run in two seconds

When you have built a word and are not sure of it, read the suffixes off the end in order and say them in English as you go, working outwards. If the English comes out as a sentence fragment that makes sense read backwards, the order is right. аавдаа: father, to, my — to my father. Good. Build it the other way round and you would get my to father, which is not English and is not Mongolian either.

Two things the test will not catch, and they are the other half of the work. It will not catch a wrong vowel, because the slots say nothing about which of the four shapes a suffix wears — that is settled by the four-form suffix table and its exceptions. And it will not catch a missing linking letter or a short vowel that should have dropped, since those adjustments happen at the joins and are collected on the page on how a word is built. Order, shape and spelling are three separate checks, and they are much easier to pass one at a time than all at once.