To Be and To Have in Mongolian

An English speaker starting Mongolian goes looking for two verbs and comes away unsatisfied twice. The first one, байна, exists but is often unnecessary. The second one does not exist at all. Taken together they account for a large share of the sentences a beginner builds wrongly, which is why this page treats them as one problem rather than two.

байна and its family

The verb is built on the stem бай–, and like every Mongolian verb it has one form per tense and no agreement with its subject at all. The forms you need from the start:

One form covers every person: байна is I am, you are, he is and they are, and nothing in the word tells you which. The subject does that job alone, or the context does it.

What байна is for

Three uses, and a fourth job as an auxiliary.

A state or a quality, now

• Сайн байна уу? (Are you well? — the ordinary greeting.)
• Сайн байна аа! (I'm well!)
• Энэ мах сайн байна аа! (This meat is good!)
• Өнөөдөр цаг агаар сайхан байна. (The weather is lovely today.)

Existence: there is, there are

• Монголд мал их байна. (There is a great deal of livestock in Mongolia.)
• Тэнд зуугаад адуу байна. (There are about a hundred horses there.)
• Мах байна уу? — Байхгүй. (Is there any meat? — There is not.)

English needs the empty subject there for this and Mongolian needs nothing: the thing that exists is simply the subject, and байна closes the sentence.

Location: where something is

• Манайхан энд байна. (My family is here.)
• Таны охин энд байна. (Your daughter is here.)
• Тэр Улаанбаатарт байдаг. (He lives in Ulaanbaatar.)
• Эндээс холгүй нэг жижиг цайны газар байдаг уу? (Is there a small tea house not far from here?)

The last two use байдаг rather than байна, and the difference is real: байна says where someone is at this moment, байдаг says where someone or something is as a standing fact. That is how Mongolian says lives in without a verb for living. The suffix –даг does this on every verb, not only this one; see the page on the present and future.

As an auxiliary

байна is also the second half of several two-piece verb forms — the action in progress, the expression of intention, and others. In those, байна has stopped meaning be and is simply carrying the tense: Би цангаж байна ("I'm thirsty", literally thirsting-be), Би монгол хэл сурмаар байна ("I want to learn Mongolian"). The forms themselves belong to the present and to wanting and needing; here it is enough to recognise that a final байна is not always the verb to be.

The past of all of it

Replace байна with байсан and the whole construction moves into the past, whatever it was:

• Тэр өчигдөр энд байсан. (He was here yesterday.)
• Энэ жүжигчин чамтай ярьж байсан. (That actor was talking to you.)
• Миний аав их сургуульд ажилладаг байсан. (My father used to work at the university.)

The third of those is the standard way of saying used to: the habitual –даг plus байсан. It is dealt with among the past tenses, on the page on the Mongolian past.

The sentence that does without the verb

Now the part that unsettles English speakers. When the predicate is a noun or an adjective, Mongolian usually says nothing at all where English says am, is or are:

• Би багш. (I-NOM teacher-NOM — I am a teacher.)
• Би эмч. (I am a doctor.)
• Би нүүдэлчин. (I am a nomad.)
• Би франц хэлний багш. (I am a teacher of French.)
• Тэр малчин. (He is a herder.)
• Миний найз малчин. (My friend is a herder.)
• Энэ миний найз. (This is my friend.)
• Тэр миний багш. (That is my teacher.)
• Энэ кино сайн. (This film is good.)
• Би чиний багш. (I am your teacher.)

Nothing is missing from those sentences and nothing is being left out casually, as a spoken shortcut. Two nouns side by side, with the second one in final position, make a complete and formal statement, because in Mongolian the final position is the predicate. The mechanics of that are on the page on word order; what matters here is that you stop waiting for a verb.

So when do you keep байна?

Both of these are correct:

• Би үйлчлэгч. (I am a waiter.)
• Би үйлчлэгч байна. (I am a waiter.)

For a plain statement of who or what someone is, the bare version is the one Mongolian prefers, and the one you should default to. Keeping байна is not an error — Би их сургуулийн багш байна is perfectly good — it simply adds weight, as though the fact were being put on the record.

Three situations are different, and in them байна is not optional:

• Location. Манайхан энд байна. You cannot say this without the verb, because here байна is not a copula linking two nouns — it is the verb that means be in a place, and it is carrying the whole meaning.
• Existence. Монголд мал их байна. Same reason.
• A state that holds right now rather than in general. Өнөөдөр цаг агаар сайхан байна is about today's weather; Энэ кино сайн is about the film as such. The verb is what pins the statement to the moment.

Questions work either way and keep their particle in both: Тэр багш уу? ("Is he a teacher?") has no verb, Сайн байна уу? has one, and in both the particle sits last. The same holds with a question word: Энэ хэн бэ? ("Who is this?"), Танайхан сайн уу? — Манайхан сайн. ("Is your family well? — They are well.") The choice of particle is governed by its own page, and the set greeting phrases are taken apart on the page on greetings.

Saying that it is not

The verbless sentence has a negative, and so does the existential one, and they are different words. биш follows a noun or adjective and denies identity: Би багш биш. ("I am not a teacher.") байхгүй is the negative of байна as existence or presence: Үгүй, түүний аав ээж энд байхгүй. ("No, his parents are not here.") The whole system of Mongolian negatives, including where these two sit in it, is on the page on saying no.

A last remark on байна before we leave it: a few set phrases carry it where English would not expect one at all, such as Сонин сайхан юу байна? for "what's new?" — literally, what interesting thing is there.

There is no verb for "to have"

The method states it without hedging, and it is worth stating here just as plainly: Mongolian has no verb to have. There is no word you can look up, no irregular form to memorise. Instead, three different constructions share the work, and all three are built out of material you already know.

One: the owner goes into the dative-locative

Put the possessor in the dative-locative, name the thing, and finish with байгаа or байна. The sentence then says, literally, to me there is a book.

• Надад сонин ном байгаа.
• me-DAT interesting book be-PROG
• "I have an interesting book."

• Чамд асуулт байгаа юу? (Do you have a question?)
• Танд асуулт байгаа юу? (Do you have any questions?)
• Доржид ном минь байгаа. (Dorj has my book.)
• Танай дэлгүүрт тамхи байгаа юу? (Do you have cigarettes in your shop?)
• Танайд уух юм юу байгаа вэ? (What have you got to drink?)

Notice that the possessor is not the subject of this sentence. Надад is a form of би with a case ending on it, and the grammatical subject is the thing owned. That is the single most useful thing to understand about Mongolian possession: the owner is a circumstance, and the thing exists. Which ending the possessor takes, and why that case does this work, is on the page on the dative-locative. And when the word in that case is a place rather than a person, the same frame simply means there is, as in the shop example above.

Two: the thing goes into the comitative

The second frame keeps the owner as the subject and puts the ending on the thing owned. The ending is the comitative –тай / –той / –тэй, which means with, so the sentence says I am with work:

• Би ажилтай. (I-NOM work-COM — I have work to do.)
• Би таван морьтой. (I have five horses.)
• Би хоёр том хүүхэдтэй. (I have two grown-up children.)
• Энэ оюутан олон номтой. (This student has a lot of books.)
• «Улаанбаатар» зочид буудал ресторантай юу? — Сайн ресторантай. (Does the Ulaanbaatar hotel have a restaurant? — It has a good one.)
• Энэ суудал хүнтэй юү? (Is this seat taken? — literally, is this seat with a person?)

There is no verb in any of those either. The negative is formed by replacing the ending with –гүй: beside Би ажилтай stands Би завгүй ("I have no free time"), and beside Би хоёр том хүүхэдтэй stands хүүхэдгүй ("childless"). The case itself, its three forms and the fact that it has no form in ө, are on the page on the comitative.

Three: бий

The particle бий closes a sentence and asserts that something exists, typically somewhere you are not and often on information rather than observation:

• Манай суманд олон адуу бий. (There are many horses in our district.)
• Миний төрсөн нутагт нэг бөө бий. (There is a shaman in the place where I was born.)
• Канадад буддын сүм хийд бий юу? (Are there Buddhist monasteries in Canada?)
• Танай сургуульд хэдэн сурагч бий вэ? (How many pupils are there in your school?)
• Танд гал бий юу? (Have you got a light?)

The last one shows бий doing possession rather than existence, with the dative-locative in front of it exactly as in the first frame. Two details are worth keeping: the question forms are бий юу? for a yes-or-no question and бий вэ? when a question word such as хэдэн is present; and бий has no negative of its own — you negate it with байхгүй.

Which of the three

The method does not give a rule that sorts them, and an honest answer is that they overlap. What can be said safely:

• –тай suits a lasting characteristic — having work, children, horses, a restaurant. It is the frame that describes the possessor.
• the dative-locative with байгаа suits a particular thing at a particular moment, and it is the normal frame for asking whether someone has something to hand.
• бий leans towards existence stated at a distance, and towards places rather than people.

In practice, imitate whole sentences from the lessons before trying to choose by rule. The reliable part is the habit underneath all three: when you want to say have, stop looking for a verb and decide instead whether you are saying that something exists somewhere, or that someone is characterised by it.