Sentences With Two Verbs

English handles two verbs by making the first one finite and the second one an infinitive: I want to learn, can you help, he did not manage to book. The grammar is at the front and the action is behind it. Mongolian does exactly the reverse.

• Бид танай гэрт орж үзэж болох уу?
• we-NOM your ger-DAT enter-CONV see-CONV may Q
• "May we come into your ger and have a look?"

Three verbs, and only the last one has any grammar on it. орж and үзэж are in a linking form that says nothing about tense, person, politeness or anything else; болох carries the question. Take the sentence apart from the end and it is simple. Read it from the front, expecting the English shape, and it is unreadable.

The pattern

The rule has two halves and nothing else:

1. Every verb except the last stands in the linking form, which is the stem plus –ж, or –ч on certain stems: орж, үзэж, уншиж, ярьж, тоолж, сэлж, and with –ч, авч and гарч. Which stems take which is set out on the page on converbs.
2. The last verb carries everything: the tense, the mood, the negation, the question particle, the collective ending. Whatever the sentence as a whole is doing, it is doing it there.

One consequence is worth stating before anything else, because it saves hours. The linking form never changes. тоолж is тоолж in a statement, a question, a negative, a past and a polite invitation. You learn one form per verb and then stop thinking about it.

Reading the chain backwards

Because the Mongolian order is the order of the actions and the English order is the order of the grammar, a chain of verbs usually has to be turned round in translation.

• Би зуу хүртэл тоолж сурмаар байна. (I want to learn to count up to a hundred.)
• Би монголоор ярьж сурмаар байна. (I want to learn to speak Mongolian.)
• Тэр морь унаж сурмаар байна. (He wants to learn to ride.)
• Би Монголд очиж үзмээр байна. (I want to go and see Mongolia.)
• Чи энд унтаж амармаар байна уу? (Do you want to sleep and rest here?)
• Бид нар аялж явмаар байна. (We want to go travelling.)
• Бид нэг малчин айлд орж үзмээр байна. (We would like to go into a herding family's ger and see it.)

The ending –маар байна running through those sentences is the Mongolian way of saying want to, and it is on the page on wanting and needing. Notice where it sits: not on the action you want to do, but on the last verb of the chain. In тоолж сурмаар байна what you want is the learning, and the counting is what you would be learning.

The verbs that usually come last

A small set of verbs turns up again and again in final position, and between them they cover most of what English does with modal verbs:

English covers several of those with the one word can, and Mongolian does not. Which of them a given sentence needs, and how the rest of the work of the English modals is shared out, is the subject of the page on modal verbs. What belongs here is where they stand and what they carry — and in Та эндээс явж болохгүй! and Энэ жуулчид морь унаж чадахгүй the answer is the same in both: the negative is on the final verb, and the first verb, явж or унаж, is untouched by it.

• Та монгол бичиг уншиж чадах уу? (Can you read the traditional script?)
• Та энэ өгүүллэгийг толь бичиг хэрэглэхгүй орчуулж чадах уу? (Can you translate this article without using a dictionary?)
• Би монголоор бага сага өгүүлбэр орчуулж чадна. (I can translate short sentences into Mongolian.)

Everything lands on the last verb

This is the practical heart of the page. Take one chain and change what the sentence does; only the final word moves.

In particular, the negative suffix never goes on the first verb. If you want to say that someone cannot do something, you do not negate the doing — you negate the being able: унаж чадахгүй, not anything built on унах. The same applies to the question particle, which sits after the final verb and closes the sentence, and to the collective –цгаа– in сурцгаая, which says that the suggestion is addressed to everyone present; that suffix has a page of its own. For the negatives, see saying no in Mongolian.

Pairs you will learn as single words

Some two-verb combinations have fused into ordinary vocabulary, and a dictionary lists them as units. The first verb is still in its linking form, and the second still carries the grammar, but the meaning is no longer the sum of the parts:

• худалдаж авах — to buy (literally: to sell-and-take)
• мэдэж авах — to find out, to learn
• гарч ирэх — to come out, to emerge
• авч явах — to take away, to carry off
• хэлж өгөх — to tell someone, to point out
• хайж өгөх — to look for something for someone
• асууж сурах — to enquire, to ask around

• Би ном худалдаж авсан.
• I-NOM book sell-CONV take-PAST
• "I bought a book."

Treat these the way you treat an English phrasal verb such as look up or give in: learn the pair, not the pieces. The useful observation is that they inflect exactly like everything else on this page — the ending goes on the last element and nowhere else, which is the same principle that governs a two-word noun group. That parallel is drawn out on the page on how a Mongolian word is built.

When the first action has to finish first

The linking form in –ж presents the two actions as one event. There is a second linking form, –аад and its harmonic variants, which says that the first action was completed before the second began:

• Бороо ороод би буцаж ирлээ.
• rain fall-CONV I-NOM return-CONV come-PAST
• "It started raining, so I came back."

• Хэн миний нохойг олоод өгч чадах вэ? (Who can find my dog and bring him back?)

That sentence has three verbs in it and shows both linking forms at once: олоод (find, and having found), өгч (give, in the plain linking form), and чадах, which carries the question. The inventory of linking forms — –ж, –аад, the conditional, and the rest — and what each of them does between clauses, belongs to the page on converbs.

Where the chain stops

A practical question when you are reading: how do you know how many verbs belong to one chain? Two markers settle it.

• A verb in the linking form is never the end of anything. If you see –ж or –ч or –аад on a verb, something else is still coming.
• The chain ends at the first verb carrying a tense, a mood or a negative — and that verb is normally the last word of the sentence, or the last word before a final particle.

So in Бид танай гэрт орж үзэж болох уу?, scanning from the left you meet орж (unfinished), үзэж (unfinished), then болох with уу behind it, and you stop. This is the same habit that word order asks of you at sentence level, applied inside the predicate.

What this is not

Two things stand close to this pattern without belonging to it.

The first is a sentence with two clauses rather than two verbs in one predicate — two subjects, two separate events, joined by a form of the first verb. Бороо ороод би буцаж ирлээ is already on that border: the rain falls and I come back, and those are two things happening, not one action described by two verbs. The dividing line is the subject. When the subject changes, you are joining clauses, and converbs is the page for it.

The second is reported speech and the nominalised clause, where a whole proposition is packed into a noun-like form and takes a case ending: Тэр Монголын байгалийг үзэхийг хүсэж байна ("She wants to see the Mongolian countryside"), where үзэхийг is a verb turned into an object. That machinery is on the page on complex sentences. The test is the same as before: in a chain, the earlier verbs end in –ж, –ч or –аад and carry nothing else. Anything with a case ending on it is doing something different.